Her teacher told her not to paint the mountains. She said, 'I'll show you'

“Don’t ever paint the Organ Mountains.”

Joshua Rose, a professor at New Mexico State University, was delivering a freewheeling lecture to a painting class in the mid-2000s during a critique of the students’ works.

“He really laid into them,” Meg Freyermuth recalls. “He went off on what it takes to be an artist and what it means, and he basically told us: Don’t do this unless you really 100% want to do it, and you’re crazy.”

And he warned them not to be trapped by the picturesque mountain range, which would be declared a national monument a decade later, “because that’s how you’ll be defined,” Freyermuth recalls. “That will be what people expect from you. ‘Oh, you’re the girl who paints the mountains.’”

“I might very well have said that to Meg,” said Rose, who retired from the university in 2008 and now lives in Albuquerque. “It was most likely in the context of, ‘but if you do, paint the best mountains I’ve ever seen.’ It would have been a challenge.”

“I’ll show you,” Freyermuth remembers saying to herself. “Don’t be an artist? Don’t paint the Organ Mountains? I’ll show you.”

Freyermuth would later cap her studies at NMSU with a landscape project comprising 10 vertical oil paintings of the Organs. Each panel is 5 feet in height, and together they measure 25 feet in width, forming a panorama of the mountains as seen from the Sierra Vista Trail.

Since 2015, they have hung over the second-floor rotunda of the Doña Ana County government building. The passage sees little foot traffic. Yet just as the Organ Mountains quietly embody the volcanic eruptions and seismic shifts that formed them millions of years ago, Freyermuth’s painting shows in color combinations, abstract shapes and lighting, an evolution in the artist’s life as well as her relationship with her landscape.

Around the time Rose warned students about painting the mountains, her own relationship with them was at a low point. They provoked grief and anger.

“I looked at the Organ Mountains and I was so mad — so mad at them,” she recalled.

Life and death in the mountains

On Jan. 21, 2006, Melba Halamicek, a close friend of Freyermuth who was a pianist and instructor at NMSU, died suddenly while hiking in the Organ Mountains near Dripping Springs.

Growing up in Las Cruces, Freyermuth and her three siblings were familiar with the area’s public lands, thanks to parents who were avid hikers and students of local plants. The family often trudged through the Organs and the neighboring mountains that are now part of the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument.

Halamicek also loved the outdoors, jogging, swimming and hiking. A month before her death, the 65-year-old reached the summit of the Organ Needle, the range’s tallest peak, approximately 9,000 feet above sea level.

“She was very independent, a very strong-willed woman, and she saw that in me,” Freyermuth said, crediting Halamicek with encouraging her to paint.

Yet at the time of her friend’s death, Freyermuth had largely set aside her passion for painting, leaving her then without an outlet to transmute her grief and fury. The loss upended her relationship with the Organ Mountains as well.

Freyermuth had begun her college career as a history major, but now she took a turn, switching her major to art. Slowly, she began hiking again — and painting landscapes.

Then, during her senior year in 2008, she spent three months working on the 10-panel painting titled, “Leap: It is unchanging, yet trembles sweetly,” which she dedicated to lives lost among the mountains.

Coming to terms via art

From August through Thanksgiving week, Freyermuth sketched the Organs from a particular spot near a trailhead off of Soledad Canyon Road, producing a sequence of interconnecting paintings that could also stand alone, each with its own poetic title. Her process included regular visits to the trail and work on the panels, two at a time, in studio.

“There are a million cliché paintings of mountains, flowers, yuccas, etc.,” Rose said. “My message to students was to always give it all you’ve got. I think Meg did exactly that. … Her mountains are unique.”

Freyermuth drew inspiration, in part, from the work of painter and silhouettist Kara Walker, known for arranging her pieces in rounded spaces or cycloramas and for exploring themes of historical trauma and personal pain.

If one “reads” Freyermuth’s paintings from left to right, the sequence begins as a conventional portrayal of the mountains as they might appear after a monsoon rain, with lush green vegetation and a sky full of fluffy white clouds. By the fourth panel, the forms grow abstract, colors and brushwork grow more agitated, almost losing sight of the Organs altogether, before familiar forms and colors resume. The final panel rests its gaze on a tree that still flanks the trail today.

“The middle pieces … they’re very unsettled. There’s a lot of conflict in those, for me,” Freyermuth said. The 2008 election was approaching as she worked on them, and her sense of political tensions at the time made their way onto canvas.

“I was still very mad,” she said. “Sometimes people talk about those pieces like I was depicting the four seasons, but in the end … I was getting the transition of coming to terms of how things are, accepting that there’s lots of pain in the world, and there is joy there too.”

Freyermuth graduated from NMSU in 2009 and stayed in Las Cruces as a professional artist. In 2015, she presented the painting to the county on loan for 10 years — a loan she subsequently extended, she said, so the public could continue to enjoy it and the work could adorn a suitable curved wall, as she had envisioned.

Art and public lands

Later in 2015, Freyermuth was invited to serve as the inaugural artist-in-residence for the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, which President Barack Obama had designated the previous year.

The twice-yearly program is a collaboration between the federal Bureau of Land Management and the nonprofit Friends of the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, offering the use of a stone cabin on federal land along with a stipend paid by the nonprofit.

“It’s a unique way to tell the story, but in a different way, about why these public lands are important,” Patrick Nolan, the Friends’ executive director, said. “Art is a great medium to tell why these places are important.”

Freyermuth spent September 2015 hiking around the monument, encountering mountain lions and foxes (“They did not like me being there”), studying the vegetation and producing several paintings as well as an essay about her experience there.

She found herself painting near the location where Halamicek passed away.

“Many people have died all over these lands for centuries upon centuries, going back further than our recorded history,” Freyermuth wrote at the conclusion of her residency. “These lands are extremely sacred to many people for many reasons, aside from the fact that the land is a gravesite for millions of creatures over millions of centuries.”

This past April, Freyermuth extended her loan of the painting, permitting the county to show it into 2035.

“Its meaning has only grown for me as it continues to help me process grief and, through that process, find love and understanding,” she told the commissioners during a public meeting confirming the loan. “It is unchanging yet trembles sweetly. This is what art does for us over time.”