Why So Many Artists Have Been Drawn to New Mexico

About a year ago, Le Feuvre relocated from London to Santa Fe to run the Holt/Smithson Foundation, an organization set up to preserve the legacy of Holt and her husband Robert Smithson, both land artists. The couple, who married in 1963, lived itinerantly for most of their lives together, until Smithson died tragically in a 1973 plane crash. Holt moved to New Mexico in 1995 and stayed there until her death in 2014.

The history of artists choosing New Mexico over big cities and coastal states is long and rich. As early as 1898,

and Bert Geer Phillips, two painters traveling from Denver, made the unexpected decision to live in Taos—one of several New Mexican towns (including Santa Fe, Galisteo, and Belen) that have since become artist havens.

By 1915, three years after New Mexico officially became a state, they’d established the Taos Society of Artists with fellow male painters Joseph Henry Sharp, E. Irving Couse, Oscar Berninghaus, and William Herbert Dunton. They made paintings in response to their new surroundings: sweeping landscapes and vigorous, expressive portraits of cowboys and Native Americans. The latter representations tend to read as uncomfortable exoticizations today, especially considering white settlers’ encroachment on Native American land and the bloody altercations that ensued at the time.

By 1918, she’d fallen in love with Antonio “Tony” Luhan, a Native American of the Taos Pueblo. Not long after, the couple—who eventually married in 1923—purchased 12 acres of land and built a 17-room home. Named Los Gallos, the ranch became a retreat-cum-residency for countless artists, writers, and intellectuals of the day. Cather, Hartley, D.H. Lawrence, AnselAdams,

From the homes she built in Cuba and Galisteo, Martin could take in wide swathes of desert and sky. In New York, the urban grid had been her jumping-off point for hard-edged

abstractions. But the compositions she painted in New Mexico loosened, diffused, and became decidedly more atmospheric: filled with bands of hazy pink and soft, diaphanous yellows. Princenthal connects this shift to the desert landscape that surrounded Martin: “It could be said that the urban grid gave way, gradually but conclusively, to a rural vision of open expanses and to sunlit shades of desert, rock, and sky.” Importantly, she offered a caveat: “As always, [Martin] would resist such associations to the landscape.”

Hopper called his new hippie hideaway “Mud Palace.” He promptly invited creative types from around Los Angeles to nest and let loose—often with the aid of psychedelics—in its sprawling honeycomb of abode rooms. Jack Nicholson, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan made the trip to Taos. So did a number of L.A.’s burgeoning cohort of Cool School and

artists, who’d convened around the legendary Ferus Gallery.

Ken Price, one of the radical artists in this group, first descended upon New Mexico at Hopper’s suggestion. In the early 1970s, he rambled to Mud Palace with sculptor

and painter

. He downplayed the experience in a 1980 interview, saying: “[We] pooped around, and we came back again.” But it wasn’t long before Price and his wife, Happy, bought a home in Taos. “We ended up just coming on up here—and staying.”

Harmony Hammond, a leader of the

movement, “didn’t come [to New Mexico] for a community of artists at all,” as she insisted in a 2008 conversation with Julia Bryan-Wilson. But that didn’t stop several of her friends from joining her in Galisteo. Lippard—a feminist theorist and curator—and Holt—a land artist—both followed Hammond’s lead and settled in the small town. “I started staying with Harmony when I was out here,” Lippard told the Santa Fe New Mexican last year, “and suddenly the land across the creek was open, and I never looked at anything else.”