An appreciation of James Magee, an artist who made El Paso his home for 40 years

By Adair Margo / Special to El Paso Matters

James Magee, an internationally recognized artist who claimed El Paso as his home for over 40 years, died in Fremont, Michigan, surrounded by family Sept. 14, 2024. 

Magee was born June 3, 1946, in Fremont (home of Gerber baby food) and described his upbringing in the third person in a 1991 interview. 

“(Magee) lived through childhood and adolescence, sold baby food in the summer, washed and waxed cars at his father’s Ford dealership, cut lawns, played football and track, and was voted class cut-up before graduating from Fremont High in 1964.” (Brettell, Rick and Jed Morse, James Magee, “The Hill,” 1991). 

After attending Alma College in Michigan – a small liberal arts college founded by Presbyterians where he majored in history and French – Magee earned a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and worked with Quakers on the Law of the Sea for the United Nations.

Magee served as a sculptor’s apprentice in Paris, roughnecked offshore in Texas and designed opera sets in New York City, where he frequented the deserted piers of Manhattan’s Lower West Side and MineShaft bar. 

Eventually he arrived in upstate New York, where he worked in an abandoned chicken coop that served as his art studio. Finding himself alone and depressed, he sculpted a wiry crucifix and put it in the yard. Nobody came to see it. He wanted to confess, but the priests he knew were so joyful he couldn’t bring himself to do it. 

An independent filmmaker recorded the sculptures Magee made at the time – terrifying work of long-suffering humanity made of concrete, rebar and Bondo.

One work titled “Ozzie and Harriett” depicted two horrifying figures with contorted faces and mouths filled with animal teeth. Harriet lay on the floor like scattered debris, her bones beaten and crushed. Ozzie stood close by, his face a gaping grimace. The work was so grotesquely evil that when Magee uncovered it, his dogs refused to enter the room. Instead of signing it with his own name, he signed it “J.R. McCoy.”

Magee sent the film to Father Amade and Father Nivard, who had befriended him in France a few years prior. The gentle priests suggested he look more closely at the beauty of God’s handiwork and he took their advice. 

He bought a set of watercolors and began to paint, first on the edge of a hayfield. He described his deliverance in the catalog “Remembering Newaygo County, the Symbolist Paintings of Annabel Livermore,” an alter ego he created, for the Muskegon Museum of Art in 2010: 

“With an emotional swelling in her transgender breast … Annabel came into being the instant her brush hit the watercolor paper next to a wild raspberry bush outside of Woodridge, New York.” 

In the extended title of the painting, “My Garden As Seen from the West Wall,” Annabel wrote:

“Once you said to me a modest drawing, say, of leaves and

buds, was like a prayer; and, if sweetly curved, would

gently bend, like a hyacinth in

the wind, to mend elements torn

deep within.”

Magee first came to El Paso in 1977 after visiting friends in Mexico City. On his return to New York City, his train derailed and he ended up in Ciudad Juárez. He was drawn to a light more intense than he’d experienced anywhere else in the world, and to Mexican culture with its “vibrancy of color and circularity of line.” 

Juárez’s gritty bars also attracted him – places teeming with human bodies where he witnessed people helping each other. 

In the New York art world, where talent supposedly rose to the top, Magee saw it being crushed underfoot. In El Paso/Juárez, he found a stimulating place with challenging space where he could heal and grow. He made it his permanent home in 1981.

Magee said years later that moving to El Paso saved his life. 

Annabel had a biography all her own when I first showed her work at Adair Margo Gallery in 1987. It said she was born in the upper Midwest and received a classic liberal arts education. She was a very proper, elderly librarian who enjoyed Tennyson and the Victorian poets, but who gave up library work to move to El Paso to paint. 

When Magee first took me to his home on Rio Grande Street at the base of Mount Franklin – the walls and kitchen ceiling filled with Annabel paintings – he told me that Annabel lived down the back door stairs in the boiler room. 

Magee began his life’s work in El Paso, buying up 2,000 acres of land in small parcels near Cornudas, Texas. There he began a massive solitary endeavor of constructing four identical 17-foot-high stone buildings connected by stone causeways. 

The structures – each with one room and two sets of double steel doors – form a cross. Inside each building is a large altarpiece weighing tons, constructed of steel, glass, metal, wax and detritus. The completion of the fourth building was in progress when  Magee died. 

At first Magee allowed no visitors except close friends since “The Hill” is a place of private devotion. After pondering his art and “The Hill” for years, I called Magee one Sunday after a church service, telling him I thought he was literally laying his sins on the cross. His response was immediate: “If you said that to the art world, they wouldn’t know what you were talking about.” 

Over time, friends and admirers have helped form the Cornudas Mountain Foundation with its own nonprofit and international advisory boards. It is affiliated with the El Paso Community Foundation to sustain and share Magee’s vision. Annual concerts by Nameless Sound are held at the site and museum collector’s groups have visited. Special visitors have included Laura Bush and Sun Jiazheng, former cultural minister of China. 

Annabel Livermore continued painting, exhibiting in museums and galleries nationwide. She created a chapel for the county hospital, relocated in the lobby of the University Medical Center. 

Annabel’s Chapel was conceived when Magee’s assistant was admitted to the psychiatric ward in 1989, and he went to visit him. In the gray, dismal surroundings, he remembered the story of Matisse filling a hospital room with sheets of vibrant colors to speed the healing process. 

Annabel’s Chapel provides a place for meditation and prayer. A small fountain fills the room with the gentle sound of trickling water. Watercolors of brightly colored flowers in gold-leaf frames line the walls like Stations of the Cross. A vaulted ceiling with painted starlit sky rises overhead, changing from sunrise to sunset in vibrant colors. 

Magee established the Annabel Livermore Flower Fund at the El Paso Community Foundation to provide fresh flowers for the altar. For several years, bud vases were delivered to each room accompanied by a little card with a colorful reproduction of a flower painting that said, “With this little gift I wish you health & happiness.” It was signed by Annabel.

When asked in a 1994 written interview about her use of a pseudonym or multiple identities, Annabel had this to say:

“…do we not all come into this world naked as Jaybirds and leave in the same way? What is a name? Is it not simultaneously a mode of empowerment and confinement, a narrow fiction of history for a species teetering on the brink of destruction and too consumed with personal identity and tribalism? Whether knowingly or not, each of us wears a disguise. We all go by pseudonyms. And in the end the only honest appellation for any of us is Child of God.” 

Adair Margo owned Adair Margo Gallery in El Paso from 1985-2010 and chaired the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities from 2000-2008. She is a former first lady of El Paso and close friend of James Magee.