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The headline read: “What’s Going On over There?” Previously, the place in question had been known as the Cook Ranch. Now it was Cerro Pelon (“Bald Hill”) Ranch; in 1999, the ground’s vegetation was razed in a pyrotechnics fire during the filming of Wild Wild West. For years, this setting—a gigantic expanse in New Mexico’s Galisteo Basin, abutting the tiny village of Galisteo—had hosted movie crews making one kind of western or another. Then, in 2001, Tom Ford, the fashion designer, bought the property. These layers of recent history are connected with older ones in print by an art writer and curator named Lucy Lippard, who, for nearly thirty years, has been running a local newspaper called El Puente de Galisteo. The “What’s Going On over There?” article, from 2004, covered plans for Ford’s ranch, as well as apprehensions about water use, aesthetics, and fertilizer. Lippard reported that “low volume mist” would water a soft layer of Australian clover meant to harbor beneficial insects. “Ford’s fondness for black is a plus here,” she wrote, “in that the irrigation risers—which are usually white and stand out like sore thumbs—will all be black.” Finally, she noted, “the only fertilizer is compost.” Lippard printed the ranch managers’ phone number in El Puente, encouraging residents to “see for ourselves what’s going on.”
Lippard, at eighty-eight, is one of the best-known multi-hyphenate art writers (-curators-critics-activists) of the past half century. Her career has focused on the large realms of feminism, activism, place, politics, and culture. She has also, in recent editions of El Puente, noted “two recent road kills: a deer and a racoon,” summarized local meetings about road signage, and edited an obituary, her name appearing not as a byline, but at the bottom corner of the newsletter’s final page, near the classifieds, some of which have continued to run unchanged since the mid-nineties, when El Puente began. El Puente, which Lippard often refers to as a newsletter (“What’s the difference?” she asked me), is an extraordinary (mostly solo) work of journalism, a map of history in progress, revealing a shifting landscape.
Galisteo, about thirty minutes south of Sante Fe, is an old, small village, composed of about two hundred and fifty people. Anna Cárdenas—whose family has been in Galisteo for at least five generations, and who was once the author of El Puente’s “Dichos y Cuentos” column, printed in Spanish1[1] This early column bore a message to its readers from Cárdenas: “I’m sorry, but I will not be translating ‘Cuentos’ because the story can get lost in the translation. Please ask one of your treasured vecinos to tell you about the cuento. Or practice your Spanish, purchase or borrow a dictionary.”—has been a witness to much change, over the years. She remembers getting the bus to school at Saddleback Ranch, which is now Modern Elder Academy: “the world’s first midlife wisdom school,” run by Chip Conley, formerly Airbnb’s head of global hospitality and strategy. “Life here was pretty simple,” Cárdenas recalled. Artists from elsewhere started showing up in the seventies—Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Fritz Scholder—and in the eighties, a boom of newcomers arrived to the area, building houses. Property taxes spiked. Cárdenas’s father and brothers, all in the construction business, lost work as cheap labor proliferated. As Cárdenas and others remember it, many of the locals sold their houses or moved into mobile homes.
An apocryphal story about Lippard’s arrival in Galisteo revolves around visiting to see Halley’s Comet, but that was a different year than Lippard’s first time out, and anyway, when she looked up she thought the comet was “sort of underwhelming,” she told me. She was more excited by the petroglyphs. Her house, which is off the grid, she used to power occasionally via her car; it sits across the bridge for which El Puente is named. The main room is painted banana-yellow and contains a lofted bed that she climbs a ladder into each night. On her coffee table, made by the artist Sol LeWitt, a friend, a thick crust of books rises. (LeWitt often complained the table was so covered with Lippard’s reading material that his handiwork was rendered invisible.) Lippard—who has gray hair and humored, flashing eyes—casually uses phrases such as “who gives a sweet hot damn” and, describing herself, “thick skin.” But she is also markedly curious, listening until she suddenly becomes volubly, generously plainspoken. When I visited, she sat in her father’s old La-Z-Boy, near which her dog’s crate served as a makeshift desk. “I’m ridiculously proud of living like a teenage boy,” she has written.
Carolyn Graham, the editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican’s weekly arts and culture magazine Pasatiempo, argues that living in a community such as Galisteo, or even Santa Fe, involves a sense of isolation. “We need each other, more than you do in a big city like LA or New York,” she told me. “You need your neighbors. We’re these small towns. We need to know, like, what the weather is going to be. If there’s something coming that we need to know about.” Of El Puente, she said, “It’s like, who lost their dog, or who’s got a building permit going. ‘You need help getting a rattlesnake off your property? I know this guy over here who does that.’” The answers to these questions are vital: news you can use.
Lippard, as El Puente’s proprietor, has come to be viewed—by both longtime Galisteans and million-dollar homebuyers—as providing a kind of public utility in their hometown, built from a sense of local need and sponsored by whoever decides to throw some support the paper’s way. (Nauman gave “the biggest donation I’ve ever had for the newsletter,” Lippard told me. It was kind of by mistake: “He gave five hundred, and then the check didn’t seem to be coming, so he gave another.”) Alex Finlayson, who recently started working as El Puente’s stringer, calls the paper “a ribbon that binds this community.” Stella Maestas, an old-time Galistean, said, of Lippard, “she is one of ours.”
“Lucy does it all,” Jean Anaya Moya, the chief of the Galisteo Volunteer Fire and Rescue, said, of El Puente. “She writes it, she edits it, she folds them and puts them in the envelope and puts the stamp on them and mails them,” she told me. “In a small community, there’s a lot of us that are tasked with a lot of responsibilities here to make this community work. We have a community association, water boards, the fire department, the art studio tour. There’s a lot of jobs that need to be done, and not a lot of people willing to do those jobs.”
When Lippard moved to Galisteo, she was almost in her sixties. As a kid, her parents called her an “antisnob snob.” She worked at the MoMA, and later, the Village Voice—trying, she wrote, to “punch holes in my art-centered specialization as I try to be accessible to a much larger audience”—until she left abruptly, with some acrimony, in 1985. In a piece from the time, she railed against her editor, and “the liberal assumption that significant questions and analyses can only be made from a so-called ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ middle ground, that anything to the left of that particular position is unsophisticated (read uneducated, with class implications) or ‘rhetorical’ (read a little too clear, and potentially dangerous).” She later published a column called “The Sniper’s Nest” at Z Magazine and contributed to In These Times. She also cofounded Printed Matter, the artist-book collective, as well as the Heresies Collective, a group of feminist artists who put out an art journal by the same name. She curated major exhibits, guest-lectured, protested, wrote reams. She spent a period in Colorado. Her latest book, Stuff: Instead of a Memoir, quotes John Berger: “the past is not for living in. It is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.” She calls El Puente her “great love.”
“I’ve always worked with community and activist stuff,” Lippard told me. “I couldn’t figure out how to do the kind of thing, you know, yelling and screaming in the streets and wheatpasting and so forth that I’d been doing in New York and Boulder, Colorado. And so I thought: a newsletter.” Maria Ortiz y Pino, a Galisteo old-timer who with discernible relish called El Puente “a good little rag”—emphasis, I took it, on the “rag”—recalled the early days of Lippard’s reporting. “All of a sudden this lady from wherever she was from was starting to ask a lot of questions,” she said. Ortiz y Pino was skeptical. “I’ve been around long enough,” she thought. “I know people who know more than she does. I really don’t have to read it if I don’t want to.” The paper was originally called La Puente, the more “New Mexican”—as opposed to Spanish—version of its name. “We got some calls,” Lippard wrote in the inaugural issue (word had already, apparently, gotten out, even before the paper was published). “If you think we made the wrong choice, let us know.” The next issue, then, featured an immediate follow-up: “As you see, we’ve bowed to popular opinion and restored EL PUENTE to popular Spanish,” Lippard wrote. “We have also made the type larger and tried to ‘lighten up’ a little, as requested.”
Early issues were slim, wild, vibrant with guest opinions, and heavy on local lore. A column titled “Here Then/Aqui Antes” spotlighted old-timer Mela Montoya’s memories of tiny snakes, thin “like a pencil,” called pichiquates, and a diphtheria epidemic that killed numerous children she knew. A photo announced an astounding find: a large ammonite fossil from between sixty-five and a hundred million years earlier. A caption noted the presidential award given to Agnes Martin, accompanied by a Romona Scholder, who “seems to be keeping her distance from Bill [Clinton],” while “Agnes looks none too happy!” Lippard examined the cadial, a large cocklebur pasture on the edge of the village with a tangled history of common and private use. A llama was stolen. A New Age institute sold, for years, in the classifieds, edible flowers and rented VHS tapes. Rebecca Solnit, passing through, became addicted to the tamales made by Josephine Anaya. Threats—many, serious—seemed to close in. “No blood for oil in Iraq, no beauty for oil in the Galisteo Basin,” read a sign held in Lippard’s hands, in a photo of several female Galisteans at an anti-drilling march in Santa Fe. Five species of woodpecker were elucidated.
The coverage reflected Graham’s observation about the practical aspects of what it means to make news in New Mexico—keeping an eye on the weather, on the water, on fires, and on the acequia system (the specific and precious communal ditch system by which New Mexico’s surface water rights operate)—as well as a need to connect the present to that which came before. This is a place where the immediate, the “very-very-hyper-hyper-local,” as Graham put it, can signal major stories, shifts. “In late March, we had almost three days without water, courtesy of a difficult leak,” Lippard reported in an April 2024 El Puente, “plus three days (and counting) without Internet, courtesy of CenturyLink. Living in rural New Mexico ain’t always easy.” Here, a piece of rock art tells a story, a rodent can destroy a vehicle and thereby your way of getting to a grocery store in winter, a knot in a rope signals an imminent revolt, a dried-up creek points to invasive, thirsty Russian olives and a fire waiting to happen. But “whatever the first impression of these vast spaces,” Lippard wrote in her book Pueblo Chico, about Galisteo, “this is in no sense a ‘timeless’ landscape. It is a landscape of many times that—once the history becomes known—can be experienced almost simultaneously.”
An article on the “bone-dry Rio Galisteo” notes that a “green team” may need to be assembled in order to lop back thirsty Russian olives, but also that Charles and Anne Lindbergh, flying over Galisteo in the 1920s, took aerial photos that show a treeless arroyo, and that in the 1950s, a Galistean’s mother-in-law planted sediment-accruing cottonwoods. All of this history relates to the disappearance of water from the ojitos, the springs, a common anxiety addressed by Lippard in El Puente. In a way, the paper is the New Mexico–village version of Lippard’s long-held idea, from when she lived in the loft scene in New York City, to make “an ‘artwork’ consisting of a pile of maps on transparent acrylic sheets showing the trajectories of a large number of artists from one loft and neighborhood to another, detailing her or his partners, jobs, gallery affiliations, best art pals, and so forth, in order to display the subterranean networks that often determined aesthetic influences, careers, politics, and love lives.” Replace artists, maybe, with water, cottonwoods, old families, Russian olives, deep time, state politics. The “point” of such a project—if art can be spoken about in such terms—is the same as that of any news outlet: to keep track of real life. Then again, it may be a stretch to call El Puente an art project; after all, that framing perpetuates an idea she’s spent a good deal of her career working against, that art and information are oppositional, and that the former belongs in an airy and impenetrable world.
Like Lippard, El Puente might be better understood as “a force,” in Finlayson’s words. Finlayson added later, “I believe El Puente is propelled by Lucy’s need to know Galisteo and to make sense of a very complicated place. In the end, the newsletter may belong more to her insatiable curiosity than it does to us. I can’t imagine it without her.”
Succession is not an uncommon problem for local news editors and publishers. Lippard may be particularly uninterested in modernizing business strategies, applying for grants, developing a newsroom—nor is that necessarily what suits Galisteo. El Puente is primarily a print operation (Cárdenas told me that she holds on to old copies: “We’ve got so many newsletters in our house that we’ve started putting it in a notebook,” she said), though the archives are now, mostly, available online, with a tool that tells visitors how to search. For years, the “kind disregard” of the local postman enabled Lippard to illegally deliver print issues to all of the village mailboxes, until those mailboxes were replaced by a monolithic bank of lockboxes, to which El Puente is delivered, and, more expensively, by the USPS.
Finlayson, who debuted as a stringer in 2024, is seventy-three. She had been a playwright, and first drove into the Galisteo Basin a few years ago while she and her husband, Steve, were visiting their son, who lives across the highway, in the town of Lamy. “I tried to google Galisteo, but there was no phone service,” she recalled. She has, she told me, “maybe the perfect background for El Puente. Drama, dark humor, lost causes, failure, humility, a nose for news—and as a stringer, I’m almost anonymous.”
Each month, she goes to Lippard with story ideas that get green-lit, or not. If it’s a personal piece—such as one she wrote on native grasses—Finlayson gets a byline. If it’s straight reportage, she doesn’t, and Lippard edits the story down. Finlayson’s first story was a piece on the vultures that swoop down on Galisteo nearly on the same late-March day every year, most recently roosting in Romona Scholder’s trees. (“While vultures are quiet birds, their routine behavior includes projectile vomiting up to 10 [feet] if a bird is frightened; peeing and defecating down their legs to keep themselves cool; and streams of toxic white liquid scat which you can see on the wall beneath the roost. None of this bothers Romona.”) “People were appreciative,” Finlayson said. She thanked Lippard, who “immediately deflected and said something like ‘It helps that you live next door.’ One’s ego always stays in check with Lucy.”2[2] Finlayson later issued a correction to this article: “peeing and defecating” had been an “embarrassingly inaccurate” turn of phrase, “since birds have only one form of excrement—gooey white guano.”
That is Lippard’s way: even with her own pieces, she is occasionally an editorial voice (“your editor”), but it can be easy enough to forget, reading, that she is behind El Puente at all. “My writing is often called ‘reductive’—not a compliment,” she wrote once, in an essay subtitled “Notes from the Radical Whirlwind.” “Yet reduction, or distillation, of complex ideas to forthright and accessible sentences is my deliberate intention as a writer.” Who else would devote an article to Tom Ford’s sprinkler system, instead of the secondhand spray of his fame?
Some of that may be attributable to awareness of her own presence as a person who came from elsewhere. A century ago, “one of the largest grazing empires in New Mexico,” owned by Don José Ortiz y Pino, “was headquartered in Galisteo,” Lippard writes in Pueblo Chico. It was a “company town.” Today, she told me, Galisteo is “basically run by Anglos.” Lippard “came just on the cusp of the gentrification,” she said. “I mean, there’d been Anglos here before, but they didn’t rule the place.” A water hookup now costs ten thousand dollars. Moya described the village to me, these days, as an “aging community”; she can count the number of kids growing up here on one hand—a far cry from her and others’ memories of being kids themselves, playing all day in the bosque. On the brown historic plaque at the center of town, whose first line reads “Spanish explorers found several Tano-speaking pueblos in the Galisteo Basin in 1540,” someone has put quotation marks around “found” and offered, above it, “LOL.”
So Lippard fills El Puente with traces of people who have come and gone, impassioned editorials, reminders about birthday parties. April Fools’ editions, called El Arroyo, are stuffed with truly fake news. And there are corrections: a wedding anniversary was the sixty-seventh, not the fifty-seventh; Lippard’s “highly recommended plumber’s phone no. didn’t make the [new Galisteo phone directory] so here it is”3[3] In the same issue, Lippard updated the village on their neighbor Jeffrey Epstein: “Also in the news is our neighbor to the south—Zorro Ranch owner Jeffrey Epstein. A civil suit has been filed against him by three teenage girls. Steve Terrell (in The New Mexican 12/10) noted that the opposing lawyer has agreed not to refer to Epstein as a ‘billionaire pedophile’ or ‘convicted child molester’ and assumes that he will also refrain from calling Epstein ‘a creepy scumbag’ or ‘despicable perv.’”; a new subdivision had an illogical name (“Hacienda Tranquilas”) that Lippard had given as “Haciendas Tranquilas,” correctly according to the rules of Spanish, though also technically incorrectly according to the actual name of the subdivision. To do local journalism is, perhaps, to be of and for a community. When Lippard, the famous art world veteran, is asked by publications for a brief description of herself, she often chooses to mention her role as the editor of El Puente. She wants to “leave Galisteo feet first,” she has written. “If I can’t read and can’t walk, please shoot me.”
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