[1] James Magee (1945–2024) drew on his experience performing his poetry in the piers at the end of Christopher Street in New York City, and the overall gay scene in the 1970s, when conceiving The Hill,[2] and the pieces contained therein, as well as their titles, began to take shape during this period.
[1] To get to The Hill, one must drive through the desert, “harsh, gently hilly, unremitting bright in the day, black at night, silent but for the wind and the occasional car or truck or perhaps the shriek of a mouse caught by a hawk”, as Richard Bretell put it.
[1][3] All buildings are precisely aligned with the cardinal points, forming a compass,[5] and contains two “17-foot-tall, hand-made, rust-steel doors, which open with a screech and clang”.
[6] It took approximately 250 eight-ton truckloads of stone to create The Hill,[3] and the whole project was built by hand by the artist and a few aides that come and go.
Richard Brettell argues that “art historians who know it [The Hill] well are a varied and fascinating group, and included (to name only five) the late Walter Hopps, Ruth Fine, Edward Lucie-Smith, Kerry Brougher, and Jonathan Katz.
Each of them felt that they had been on a kind of pilgrimage — and, like all faithful pilgrims, each has returned.”[5] In fact, Walter Hopps praised The Hill of James Magee as a “…magnificent achievement comparable in quality to Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Heizer’s Complex I and Complex II, Turrell’s Roden Crater and De Maria’s Lighting Field.”[1] Willard Spiegelman from the Wall Street Journal calls The Hill a “masterwork… impressive, indeed extraordinary… a map of the imagination,"[4] and Pamela Petro writes “… an extremely American work… reducing articulate art historians to murmuring wonder… a work capable of making adults weep and begetting terror… whose meaning is too abstract to grasp — a sacred space that extends particularly straight to the imagination.”[3] In 2016, the Smithsonian Archive of American Art acquired all archives focusing on The Hill and his artistic career.