Monumental Tiny News

April 22, 2025 at 10:26PM

With just a few hundred people, the town of Galisteo is probably better known to art fans and film location scouts than it is to most New Mexicans. But that hasn’t stopped 88-year-old force of nature Lucy Lippard from publishing the weekly local paper El Puente de Galisteo for almost three decades. For CJR, Lucy Schiller visits Lippard to find out more about the long-running, nearly single-handed labor of love.

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.

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