Artists see things the rest of us can’t. Their eyes are connected to some secret center of the brain that transforms the ordinary into the exceptional. When Harmony Hammond, a noted contemporary artist, first saw a crumbling stone building surrounded by weeds and crawling with snakes and insects, she knew she was home. Hammond likes layers—both tangible and intangible—so this place at the crossroads of past and present spoke to her soul.

Galisteo, New Mexico, just south of Santa Fe, is a town with layers of time. On a hot day, it seems to snooze in the sun, just as it might have a century or so ago. Its slumped adobe buildings nestle closely together in the cottonwood shade. Many of the 300 residents trace their families to the Spanish colonial ranchers and farmers who first lived here. Others, like Hammond, have come more recently, but gently, so that the fabric of village life seems undisturbed—as eternal as the humpbacked rocky outcropping the villagers call “the wave.”

Hammond was looking for a place that felt right. She first came to New Mexico from New York City as a visiting artist at the University of New Mexico. Soon, she knew she had to stay. An energetic woman with small square hands, pale hair pulled relentlessly back, and intense eyes the color of sky, she radiates certainty as she describes finding the dilapidated Galisteo lanera, a community wool warehouse that was almost a hundred years old when she bought it in 1989. “It was a mess,” she recalls emphatically. “But I could just see the potential.”

 

 

 

Besides having the vision, Hammond had the improvisational skills that artists who lead less than wealthy lives often develop. “I lived in and renovated many lofts when I was working as an artist in New York,” she says. “I was always moving around to a new neighborhood that was really cheap. So I had a sense of this kind of big interior space and what could be done with it.”

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