Agnes Martin, a celebrated painter of serene grids and subtle bands of color, landed in New Mexico after an abrupt departure from New York, where she'd suffered a series of psychotic breaks. When the younger artist Harmony Hammond met her a decade later, in 1978, Martin was living in Galisteo, a small, drought-stricken village south of Santa Fe. Her home was a trailer she'd had Woodman camouflage by covering its exterior with adobe mud.
"I was amazed that this woman who has 'made it' as an artist, who has the money and freedom to spend all her time on her work, has such a small studio and chooses to live in this funky little place," Hammond wrote in her journal that night. "It was a sparse, clean feeling. Coming from New York, I was impressed with the simplicity of her life and found myself fantasizing something similar."
Those dreams lingered with Hammond, who settled in Galisteo in 1989, when a defunct wool barn came up for sale. Now it's a handsome loft with sunlight streaming through the skylights and leather furniture around the fireplace. Back then it was a ruin. "This was really rough and raw," she said when I visited in April, waving toward the living room. "I called it 'the pit.'" The unheated stone building was full of debris. Snakes and rodents came and went through gaps in the floorboards. For a decade, her kitchen consisted of a hot plate. Hammond didn't care. Just outside her door, miles of blond grass and sage-green saltbush spread out beneath the infinite blue above. Hers was the kind of view Willa Cather had in mind when she observed in "Death Comes for the Archbishop," her 1927 novel set in New Mexico, "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky."
Moving to New Mexico (first to Santa Fe in 1984) was supposed to be a one-year reprieve from her frenetic life in New York, where she had helped found A.I.R. Gallery (the first all-female collective gallery) and the journal Heresies. She was also a single mother and a lesbian juggling part-time jobs and a studio practice in an overwhelmingly straight, male industry. In New Mexico, Hammond discovered "a different quality of time" and a rare degree of acceptance. "I like all the metaphors of the West, where there's space for everybody," she said, dressed in black down to her cowboy boots, white hair pulled back from her sun-tanned face. "There's room to be who you think you are or want to be. And it's always been that, especially for women."
New Mexico shifted the materials in Hammond's work. Long drives through the desert to a teaching gig in Tucson, Ariz., took her past abandoned farms, places steeped in the unknowable stories of vanished inhabitants, where she would recover scraps of linoleum, burned lumber and battered sheets of tin. In subsequent works on canvas, grommeted straps of material salvaged from aikido mats (Hammond practiced the martial art for decades) become bandages binding abstract bodies. These paintings, steeped in metaphor, caught the eye of the New York dealer Alexander Gray, who began representing her in 2013. Hammond, 80, now lives mostly off sales of her art.
