Bringing It All Back Home: An Interview with Hills Snyder

“We’re 40 miles out,” read my text to Hills Snyder, which I sent while looking out the car window at the passing landscape as my husband drove along I-25, keeping an eye out for the turn off to Magdalena, New Mexico. Snyder had alerted me to the fact that his gallery, kind of a small array, was “likely to be packed” that day for singer-songwriters Tamara Zibners and Jennifer Sirey’s house concert. It was my first visit to the venue, and I figured “packed” could mean anything from 12 to 1,200 seats. I was eager to arrive.

Snyder and I met late last year at the opening of an exhibition I curated at 516 ARTS in Albuquerque. In learning more about him and his work, I realized that our interests and communities overlap in numerous ways, mainly due to mutual Texas friends and colleagues. Since meeting him, I’ve been curious to learn more about his move to Magdalena, the happenings at kind of a small array, and how he’s been able to carve out a creative life for himself. 

What follows is a transcribed conversation with Snyder that took place in the gallery after the concert. It has been jointly edited for clarity.

 

Nancy Zastudil (NZ): Your project, Altered States, has been on my mind since I saw your exhibition at Phil Space in Santa Fe earlier this year. The destination drawings, if I may call them that, really hit home for me. I like to think of drawing as a uniquely human way to process experiences and memories, with little to no concern for what an “accurate” depiction might be. I especially like to think of that process happening in relation to some of the places you visited, with names like Bummerville, Downer, and Nothing. I wonder what the result would be if someone drew your drawings from memory.  

Hills Snyder (HS): I like that designation, “destination drawings.” Implies a location behind the plane of the drawing, which, as it turns out, is just a sign. Pierre Menard could pull it off, the drawing from memory. Or, if you had thirty-two people all drawing from memory at the same time, spontaneous synchronization could occur, allowing everyone to arrive at the same drawing.

NZ: Is Altered States your first project since moving to New Mexico?

HS: Not really. Altered States is an ongoing writing and drawing project that began before I moved here. The way it is installed at Phil Space is unique, with the Four Corners, Great Plains, and Mountain states in separate groupings. 

In 2022 there was an unusual version of Steam at ripple effect, a project space at Santa Fe Community College. This is a work that began in Amsterdam and travelled to Miami and a couple of different venues in Texas. 

Sometimes I’m trying to create situations for people that replicate, or probably more accurately, mimic, experiences with psychoactive substances that have been important to me, like with my project Book of the Dead at Artpace, in which participants made their way through several chambers before encountering The Intoxicating Angel handing out high-quality tequila in the Living Room after exiting a pitch-black maze. The wish was to bring people into a space where they’re willing to let go of some control, allowing various layers to peel away. Fun, in so many words. Steam offered a similar opportunity to a number of folks from Magdalena and around New Mexico who chose to “ride the chair.”

In 2023 we did Milton’s Bar, a group project with Jeff & Bryan Wheeler and Hayden Pedigo, that originated at The $#%& Show in Lubbock, finding its most complete version in Santa Fe at No Man’s Land. 

Last May, Warehouse 1-10 hosted a set of new drawings, all based on Magdalena.

NZ: When and why did you come to Magdalena? What brought you out here? This is my first time stopping for a visit, even though I’ve driven through several times on my way out to The Lightning Field in Quemado. 

HS: You worked there. I imagine that offered some insights.

NZ: I feel incredibly lucky to have worked for Dia/The Lightning Field. I was able to peek behind the scenes at the day-to-day operations at the field, which isn’t glamorous — it’s truly hard labor. My job was to handle reservations and to liaise with the caretaker and Quemado crew, and I worked primarily with Kathleen Shields, who had been the administrator for over 20 years. My experiences with Dia also taught me a lot about urban folks’ understanding (or lack thereof) about New Mexico and rural desert life…and how art relates. But I was able to spend time with the artwork in the landscape and, I believe, got a glimpse of what attracted Walter to the area. The sky, the land, the wind, the light…some people have tried to write about it, but the physical experience with the environment is really what stays with you.

HS: I don’t have a bucket, or rather the one I do have has a hole in it so it’s really more of a funnel, but The Lightning Field is definitely on my list! I’ve tried the January 31st at midnight call a few times, but so far, no go.

What brought us out here… After 28 years in San Antonio and 15 years in Austin before that, it just got too expensive to stay in the city. And I have a long history in New Mexico — when I was a kid, we visited my uncle’s ranch south of Clayton in the 1950s and ʼ60s, and in ʼ68, I began backpacking in the Lincoln National Forest, places I still love.

Caralyn and I both wanted to be in the mountains, so we poked around and looked a lot in New Mexico and Crestone, Colorado. In New Mexico, we went to Ruidoso, Cloudcroft, Weed, Jemez, and Madrid and had plans to look in Mora, but Magdalena made the most sense. It started with the house. It’s small, about 800 square feet, and something about it was just so appealing. Our neighbor has horses and is an animal person. 

We can easily walk to where nothing may be heard except insects and birds — impossible to put a value on that.

NZ: Did you know much about the town before moving here?

HS: Not really, but I did find Warehouse 1-10 online before coming here in November of 2017 to take a look at the house. Catherine De Maria, the director of that space, and her partner Athena Gassoumis, put together a dinner for us on the spot, and we met a handful of artists and writers, enough people to realize that there was a creative nucleus here.

I had fantasized about living near a trailhead forever, but knew that Nogal Canyon near Lincoln was unaffordable. The house we have now is up in Hop Canyon, 2 1/2 miles from the trailhead into the Magdalena Mountains. It’s a small range, approximately 18 miles long, but features two 10,000-foot peaks. 

Another thing I love about this place is the way the clouds in the sky reveal the high-altitude wind.

NZ: Your Magdalena drawings are some of my favorites. I can’t help but see a lot of your mark making in those works and others as writing, a kind of language. And hearing you talk about the wind out here…it’s as though thoughts and messages have been scattered across the pages, filling in or accenting bits of terrain here and there. Could you recognize one of the drawings from that series as being of Magdalena without seeing the title? Or any of the drawings for that matter? 

HS: You’ve aligned the unpredictability of wind with mark making. It is like that: momentary sensitivities come into play, may blow through suddenly, when some decisions are resolute, while others are more like flashes of intuition. 

The Magdalena drawings are specific to place in a way that the Altered States drawings are not, given that the locations are in the community I live in, as opposed to being of the road — so yes, I can put myself back into the moment those places were visited, in the moment when the specific drawing was made, though I have to say, I’m more interested in other kinds of recognition. One of the aspects of working with students that I loved was that moment when they would begin to realize that art making is a way for unconscious parts of yourself to begin to see the light, a kind of self-recognition when the big I starts to whisper to the little I. 

NZ: Were you teaching at the University of Texas at San Antonio up until the point that you moved?

HS: We got the Magdalena house in November 2017, and I quit teaching at UTSA in December of 2018 so that I could spend most days of the following year fixing every single thing in the house we were living in so we could sell it. We were also finishing an album [Paper Kisses] and hosting one more house concert, the last of 62 house concerts we had there since 2013. The day we moved here was a really fortuitous day.

NZ: (laughing) Why am I not surprised?

HS: At the end of November 2019, I needed one more week to get everything finished on the San Antonio house. It just so happened that on December 7, Joy Harjo was going to read at the KiMo Theatre in Albuquerque, so I was trying to finish things up at the house so I could meet Caralyn at the theatre on that date. I got to the KiMo right before the performance started, and we’ve been in New Mexico full-time ever since. We cemented the whole thing under the wonder of Joy Harjo.

NZ: This morning on the drive out here, I was listening to an interview with Edward Norton about the new Bob Dylan film, A Complete Unknown. David Lynch came up in the interview, and I know you’re a fan of both. How have their nonlinear styles influenced your own?

HS: What a great film! Wonder what was said about Lynch in that interview — the scene of Johnny Cash maneuvering his caddy seems down his alley. Anyway, non-linear, this is just how I think. And because there might be more than one answer to the question, it’s kind of like a wagon wheel or a Roulette wheel. Where’s the ball going to land? It can vary according to circumstances. There are more spokes in a wheel than there are days in the week, so possibilities multiply.

Some songs start with an idea, maybe. Or some songs are written to kind of save your life in that moment emotionally. There are times a song is written in response to an immediate experience, such as “Far Away,” which was written at a Sala Diaz fundraiser immediately after hearing my friend tell a story about a time in 1975 when he was 15 and sent to bible camp. He and I were shooting the breeze with two other people when the subject came up, somehow relevant to whatever we were talking about. Seems his tia got him to bible camp where he had sex and dropped acid for the first time. His story struck me, and my little Alvarez guitar was in the truck so I disappeared from the group for about ten minutes, then came back in and played the song for them as they were all still standing together. He was delighted and asked me to play that song for him over the years if he was around when we had a Porch Night at Sala.

Dylan and Lynch have some things in common. One is that any understanding of America will be intensely enhanced by the lenses they provide. Dylan’s humor is existential and metaphysical at the same time — “Somebody got lucky / but it was an accident.” That is a mobius strip of meaning with a seam that cannot be found and is hilarious. 

“The first one now will later be last,” — that is a message from some outpost on the other side of eternity, a hope that rings true to anyone who has suffered injustice or even observed injustice, of which there is plenty, even more since January 20. Did “Dylan” even “write” those lines? A reading of his Nobel speech might indicate that he knows some inner voice writes these things, working with words and ideas embedded in the psyche. He refers to internalizing the language and structures of traditional songs and blues, literature…that stuff comes back out, adding to the form. He’s still at it too, Rough and Rowdy Ways is among his very best records. My sister had a copy of Bringing It All Back Home, I have to credit her with having records in the house that I listened to a lot. The main thing I got from Dylan as a teenager was the idea of self-invention.

The fake bird in Lynch’s window says something about how skewed human perception can be, how experience may be idealized to a point of falsity. But it’s a film, so the beauty is there — Lynch doing his art counteracts the holes that his work punches in the American ideal. Being real about it is important, whereas idealizing things actually diminishes them.

NZ: It’s interesting to hear you talk about songwriting as an individual process but also as a response to shared experiences. When and how did Wolverton form?

HS: We played our first gig in March 2011, but didn’t at all know it was going to become an ongoing thing.

Two curators in San Antonio, Anjali Gupta and Andy Benavides — by the way, Andy’s having a show here in Magdalena in June — had the idea to do an exhibition in the unoccupied penthouse of a hotel downtown. All of the artists were invited to select a space for whatever they were going to do. The site visit revealed what I call an “executive bathroom,” which was huge, so I figured a group could be put together to make good use of those acoustics. 

My friend Jeremiah Teutsch, who became our first bass player, sat on the twin-sink countertop playing his fiddle, his feet in one of the sinks full of water. Caralyn and Kate Terrell, and another friend of ours, Michele Monseau, stood singing in the shower — like they were a chorus. The bathtub was filled with water, I was sitting on the edge with my guitar and with my old boots on, immersed. Teacups floated in the water, which is a recurring thing for me in different projects. We played two sets, went really well. The evening ended in an after party on the roof of the hotel. Something that happened up there that became the frame for the first song Caralyn and I wrote together, Pool, later that night, at home, drunk on the couch. 

After that, Mike Casey invited us to play at his birthday party in June, and there were a couple of community fundraisers, but we really got going with our July 2012 event, Wolverton Wakes Up, at Guy Hundere’s place in San Antonio, Tortilleria La Popular. When the doors to the stage, which was actually Guy’s elevated bedroom, were pulled back, we were seen to be under his projection of a starry sky, horizontal and side by side in bed, each of us gradually “waking up” and moving to our instruments.

NZ: And so, when did you open kind of a small array?

HS: Between 2017 and 2019, I was here in Magdalena for chunks of time, a week or two at a time, putting a floor in and otherwise working on the house. One of those times, I saw a “for rent” sign in the window of this space. I had curated art shows for other artists since I was in high school, have always done this, and I knew that I would keep doing it. I wanted to keep the house concert thing going too, because those listening room experiences were always so deeply satisfying.

Once I learned how incredibly reasonable the rent was, I started working in the space before we had completely moved here. The first show in the gallery was a collaboration of Jeff Wheeler and Daniel Johnston, May 2018.

NZ: When I opened a contemporary art gallery in downtown Albuquerque, I learned a lot about people’s expectations of what a gallery is, or rather what they thought it should be. In the first few months, it seemed that almost everyone I talked to assumed that I had opened the gallery so that I could show my own artwork. But I’m not an artist, I’m a curator, which made those conversations even more curious. In the four years that the gallery was open, it was always heartening to meet people who were eager to be involved and to understand more about the artists whose work was on view. What’s it been like for you to open an art gallery in a small town like Magdalena? 

HS: It’s been going really well — you saw how it was today — everything we do is well attended. People here seem to love it; they are hungry for it, and I love them right back, it is their energy that makes it happen. 

I’m sorry to have missed your space, Central Features — kind of a small array opened the year you closed. What would you say was the gist of your project?

NZ: Initially I opened the space to connect local and national artists with new audiences, and honestly just to see what the fuss was all about in terms of running a business. And I had lofty goals of supporting artists who were working with environmental and social justice issues through art sales. Sometimes that happened, sometimes it didn’t. But I learned more in those four years about working with artists, curating exhibitions, presenting public programs, budgeting and similar than I ever did in grad school.

Curating shows, writing and playing music, writing about art, maintaining your visual art practice, staying connected with your community… that’s a lot to juggle. Is there a typical day in the life of Hills Snyder? How do you make time to do all of that? I often hear from artists that it feels like they can’t do all the things.

HS: Completing one thing creates several other things to do, so never being able to do all the things I want to do is a position I like being in. Typically, I get up between 5:00 and 6:00. First things are washing dishes, making coffee, building a fire. Then reading and writing until Jackson Bailey is ready to go for his walk on the public land a short distance from the house. After that I come down to the studio and/or the gallery and do other kinds of work, continue writing if there is a project or a song calling, or do whatever it is that needs doing, be it wild or domestic.

To me it’s all the same. Whether it’s curating, writing about another artist, song writing, making art, poetry, teaching, it’s just a continuum. It’s all coming from the same center. When I would go teach a class it was just like an explosion in my heart. It’s no different than some creative moment making stuff.

Staying in touch with community is facilitated by the space, which actually creates moments of community. And I really like the momentary exchange with people running the register at the gas stations and so forth. A little thing like that is community too. It’s something I’ve done a lot, at a hardware store throughout my high school years and at a couple of book stores since, so I recognize it as a few seconds when a kind of energy comes into play. It’s a friendly delight.

NZ: Do you miss teaching?

HS: Yeah, I definitely miss it, but given that I’m going to be 75 this year, I’m not going to try to find another teaching gig, 

In 2003, Fran Colpitt hired me to teach a senior level course at UTSA called Contemporary Studio. I changed the name of it to Contemporary Studio/Ancient Knowledge, enabling a niche for what I was offering. The class was structured around exposure via films to Indigenous cultures in contrast to contemporary experience, while also working with the basics of how to get the most out of watching a film. 

The movies were shown in sixteen clusters of several films, each oriented towards specific kinds of related information. For example, there was a series called America that featured Atanjarat: The Fast Runner, Dead Man, Little Big Man, Stroszek…a series called Australia, which included Ten Canoes, The Last Wave, Charlie’s Country. One section was called Folk Horror, with movies like A Field in England, and another called Paranoid Lampshades, featuring films that might conceivably fall under a heading like that. These are just a few of many. Along the way, students were exposed to different kinds of cultures. Inevitably, something the students saw, or something from the discussions that followed, ended up in their work somehow, but without any expectation — just an opportunity for seeing something.

A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies was one of the movies I used in the class. One of my favorite things Scorsese talks about in that film is from Goodfellas. Throughout the film, Ray Liotta’s character Henry Hill is in a transactional relationship with Jimmy Conway, played by Robert De Niro. Within the scene, they are at a place in their relationship where things are moving toward distrust and violence. The two of them are shown in profile, sitting across from each other at a table in a café with a window behind them. Their conversation dances around. They are trying to get a sense of each other. The shot is a combination of tracking toward them while a zoom is focused on what is outside the window. The camera eye is subliminally showing you the change in their relationship, which you pick up on whether conscious of it or not.

There were two visits per semester in each section of the class to Cave Without a Name, a place about 45 minutes from the school. I’d known of the cave since the early nineties, really enjoyed going there a lot and on one visit I mentioned to the director that I would love to spend the night in the cave. He couldn’t really let me do that, but the conversation led to my bringing my classes there to sit in total darkness and silence. Early in the semester we would visit the cave for the hour-long tour and then return near the end of the semester for sitting still in the black. The cave is 80 feet underground, so the darkness is total, with water dripping everywhere at different volumes and frequencies, almost symphonically. The idea was to sit there and be still. We’d spend more than two hours doing that and the students always thought it was barely 40 minutes, which says something about how effective it was. Would set up the tour visit with Herzog’s The Cave of Forgotten Dreams and screen Ken Burn’s Seeing, Searching, Being for the sitting in silence visit.

There was some extraordinary work that came out of those classes. Given all we got up to, yes, I miss teaching a lot!

NZ: If I had experienced a class like that, my art education might have taken a different turn! Do you feel like you’re teaching people or changing them somehow through the shows you do at kind of a small array? 

HS: No, I wouldn’t say I’m teaching anybody anything, but I do love sharing the work of artists I know. The thrust of what I’m doing here is art, poetry, music, and early on, before they were volunteered a space of their own, early events of Caralyn’s theatre group Magdalena Stage. 

With the exception of several local and New Mexico poets with projects and performances at the gallery, I’m offering work that would not otherwise be seen in Magdalena. 

NZ: What are you working on now? What’s happening?

HS: A project I’m passionate about right now is a cat shelter I’m building at the studio with help from my son, Utah. I’ve enclosed the back porch in such a way that feral cats in the neighborhood have a place to escape wind, weather, and loose dogs. There are currently about ten cats regularly using the shelter. I get to watch them play through the window. It is also a contraption to contain and capture strays for the spay and neuter program supported by The Ark and The Animal Protective Association of Socorro. 

But I imagine you mostly mean art, music, etc. We did three recording sessions with Joe Reyes when we were in San Antonio recently, excited to see where that goes, and I just got a large piece of Stonehenge paper, 30 x 40, but I’m not going to reveal too much about the piece I’m planning, except to say that it involves a single-line profile of a cyber truck and piss-yellow transparent Plexiglas.

Also have in mind to be on the lookout for an opportunity to expand Altered States into the Pacific Northwest and the Mississippi Delta, completing the continental map west of the big river. 

What’s happening — Wolverton will be performing with Butterfly Cult on March 16 at the Anderson Museum in Roswell. The version of Altered States at Phil Space has been extended to end May 1. James Hart and I will be doing a song swap there on April 3. The next events at kind of a small array are a house concert by Bill and Jeanne, a duo from Socorro, March 29, and an opening for a show by Jeremiah Teutsch, April 12.