JAMES MAGEE received his B.A. from Alma College in Michigan and his J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His years following law school were filled with significant contributions to the Law of the Sea and work with the Quakers as well as a stint in New York as a set designer.

He arrived in El Paso in 1977, the result of a train derailment in Mexico, and ended up staying. He purchased an old bottling plant for use as a studio and in its cavernous 6,000 square feet he transforms raw materials from dumps and salvage yards into objects of beauty and meditation.

Magee produces only two to three works a year yet his "sculptured paintings" have received wide acclaim, being included in the compendium of world contemporary art, ART TODAY by Edward Lucie Smith, and in numerous museum exhibitions including Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum and Yale University Art Museum.

Jim Edwards writes that Magee's art "celebrates a material and emotional transience, a perishable yielding (His) sculpturally assemblaged poems remind us that rust never sleeps."

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