Libre! How They Built Freedom and Made it Last

Hey, y’all. Happy Tuesday.

Last week Bar\Heart took you into a remote area of Colorado and introduced you to the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch and their attempt to build a rural idyll for transgender and queer people. But, as we discovered, they are just the latest in a long history of dreamers and seekers drawn to this 100-mile strip of wilderness that runs along the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. (If you haven’t read Part 1 of this trilogy, you can do that here.)

This week, we’re taking a little interlude for a conversation with sculptor Linda Fleming, who co-founded the artists’ colony Libre in these mountains in 1968. (That's her house in the photo above.) It was near Drop City, the country’s first rural commune, but unlike Drop City — and many of the intentional communities (1) of that era — it didn’t burn bright and disappear. Libre is still very much alive. That means this isolated place birthed both the first and what is one of longest-running rural communes in the country.

A quick note: Linda will hate me calling it a commune because of what the word can evoke. Libre is most decidedly not what you might envision. Though they were hippies, and there were shenanigans, they weren’t building a place to drop out. She and her then-husband, Dean, and their friends, Peter and Judy, started Libre as a place to make art. They wanted the freedom of space and place that they didn’t have in New York City. Libre residents share the land, but each person is responsible for building and maintaining their own living space. And that’s how it has worked for 53 years.

Today Linda is 75, and she and her husband, artist Michael Moore, come back to Libre each summer. The rest of their time is split between the Bay Area — where she is a professor emeritus at California College of the Arts after spending more than 20 years leading the sculpture department — and their off-grid home in the Smoke Creek Desert of Nevada.

Linda’s work can be found across the world, from this one in the American embassy in Baghdad to this one at Michigan State University (where I teach!). She is currently completing a 10-foot, three-dimensional sculpture that will be installed in a new community center in Big Sky, Montana.

We ended up in a wide-ranging conversation about Libre, building a life and what it means to belong in America. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity, but it is not short. So grab a drink (spicy marg? French 75? mocktail?) and settle in.

Cheers!

What was it like being one of the founders of Libre?

I was 22, and I was the youngest person. There were four of us — Dean, me, Peter Rabbit and Judy, his wife — and I was very adamant that I was not going to be a prairie housewife or a mountain housewife. I had big dreams and ideas about my own life and my own work. I came here to be an artist, not to homestead land.

Did you grow up in the country or have any experience with rural life?

I was born in Pittsburgh. My father worked in a factory till that factory closed and he lost his job. We were poor and we didn't live in the country, but my father loved it. He was a hunter. And he used to tell me about the experiences he would have in the woods and the sunlight. It was always important to him, and I think that impressed upon me. We were very close. He always talked to me as if I were an intelligent human being, even though I was just a little girl. And that had a huge impact on me. I always feel like Libre is for him, too.

What brought you all here to start Libre? Why not Montana or Wyoming or some other rural place?

Dean was part of a group of artists called Park Place in New York. It was a really extraordinary cooperative; it was the first gallery in what became Soho. And in 1967 Dean was invited to Denver by a woman who was promoting contemporary art in Colorado. He had a day when there wasn't anything going on and he went up in the mountains and he just completely fell in love.

Park Place was feeling like it was becoming more of a commercial gallery, but the original idea was to be a breeding ground of ideas, not be driven by the marketplace. So we decided we would come back out West because it was so beautiful there. The epic views that you have in the Rockies are just so extraordinary for the mind. We'd come out here and find a place that would be a rural outpost for this new kind of evolved Park Place.

What type of place were you looking for?

We weren't going to build anything. We were looking for one of the old schoolhouses that were all over the West. (2) We thought it would be perfect for making art, and we could just move right in because we were used to living in lofts and spaces that weren't houses.

But it was really hard to get any of these buildings from the municipalities. Dean had long blond hair; I had long red hair and short skirts. And we were, you know, people from New York. And these little local municipalities thought we were the devil incarnate. So we had a hard time trying to convince anybody that what we wanted to do was a good thing.

A lawyer of a friend of ours was a Vigil, and his family had the last piece of their land grant (3) down in southern Colorado. There was a schoolhouse on their land, but they had deeded it to the school district. But he had this small empty house on a bridge, and he said we could stay there while we tried to get the schoolhouse. So that's why we were in southern Colorado. We originally were looking in northern Colorado.

Interesting. I’d assumed it was Drop City, which was nearby, that drew you down there.

No, we actually started going to Drop City to just see what was going on there because we had no friends. We were in the middle of ranching country. One of our neighbors befriended us, but he was a very straight-laced cowboy. We really couldn't be close friends because we had very different ideas about the world and politics, but we liked each other. So we started going to Drop City and became friends with the people there, and with Peter and his wife, Judy.

It was just when Drop City was falling apart and the original people were leaving. It had turned into something they didn't have in mind at all. They wanted to be artists making a wild and insane project, but instead young people just started showing up, heard some music, took some acid, and thought they'd come live in your house. It was really devastating.

You obviously didn’t get the schoolhouse. How did you find the land?

We were looking all around southern Colorado, all around Trinidad, but the land that Drop City had was really terrible land. It was a small few acres, very exposed, very flat, surrounded by various other people. And there just wasn't that thing that drew you there. And I knew I didn’t want that.

At first we were trying to deal without a real estate agent; we thought it would just be wasting money. And then we'd find beautiful places that would be owned by seven different relatives, and we'd make a deal but one person would object and they'd come to us and say, Well, I won't tell the others, but you have to pay me this much more for my share. It got really complicated. Every time we would look at a piece of land, we had to dream of what it would be like to do it. So it was always heart wrenching.

Editor's note: We need a quick break. Here's Linda in 1979. Go refill your drink.

Finally, we got a real estate agent in Walsenburg, and they were just the most wonderful people. We walked into their office and on their desk was an invitation to Richard Nixon's inaugural speech. And we thought, Oh, no, these people can't be our people. But they were; they were just the best people.

They showed us land, and there was one piece that Dean and Peter really liked but I didn't. It was all forested and there were no meadows. And, as I said, I was 12 years younger than Dean and at least 10 years younger than just about everybody else, but they listened to me. So we said we didn't want it, but we were bereft. And then the realtor said, Well, there's this other piece of land.

It was a really beautiful piece of land. Three hundred and sixty acres that starts at about 8,300 feet and goes up over 9,000 and is surrounded by national forests on two sides and has two streams.

Everybody had to build their own house, and so we built two houses first, our 40-foot geodesic dome, and Peter and Judy’s zome. I'm the one who did the model for the dome and figured out all the strut lengths.

Because your background is sculpture?

At the time I was painting.

Oh, I didn’t realize.

Yeah, I was doing three-dimensional paintings that were kind of plywood structures, but I was a painter. I'd never built anything besides a bookshelf. I loved domes, but I didn't know much about them. Clark Riechert, one of the founders of Drop City, gave me what are called ‘chord factors.’ Those are decimal numbers for each strut length depending how many triangles are in your dome. It’s a little complicated, and I forget now how these decimals work. I never studied math; I never even took algebra. But I took those numbers and I built a model using, I think, matchsticks. I didn't have any balsa wood. There wasn’t a lot of stuff around.

That’s amazing that your brain just put it together and was able to see it.

It was a time of well, okay, anything's possible. We didn't know any better.

My dad taught me addition and subtraction with matchsticks and sugar packets.

That's terrific. So, we determined that Judy and I would cut all the boards for both of our houses. We had a radial arm saw and we would work one day on the dome and one day her zome. We would measure all these boards and cut them. And they were all tricky angles. Everything had to be numbered.

What about Dean and Peter?

Dean and Peter were putting footings in the ground and they built the floors. By the time they were ready to put the dome and zome together, it was early September. We’d been working on this all summer. And I was the only person who knew how the dome went together. And I had just had my baby in an adobe house.

Wait. You were pregnant while you were doing this?

Oh, my goodness, yes. I was very pregnant. You know, we were young and dumb.

At the time, at least, the county was one of the poorest in Colorado. There wasn't even a medical clinic nearby. You all actually helped start one later. So how did you find a doctor?

We couldn't find any hospital or doctor out there that would allow natural childbirth. It was just unheard of. So we kept asking around and someone finally told us about a doctor in the area. But he was about 86 years old and had been retired for 20 years.

We met his wife, who was a nurse and quite a bit younger, and she introduced us. When I told him we were looking for a doctor to deliver our baby and wanted to do a natural childbirth, he said, Well, what does that entail? So I told him and talked about breathing. And he said, I've studied the Hindus and I understand the power of music. So we gave him some things to read and he said he would be very excited to do that. About a week later he delivered the baby.

That was right when you were trying to actually assemble the structures, right? There wasn’t much time before winter.

Yeah, and I was the only one who knew how the dome went together, so I just sat on a pile of plywood in the middle of the dome and pointed and told everybody what to do while I was nursing my baby. It was kind of madness. But we were able to put this thing together and move into it before the winter started, which was pretty extraordinary.

{Editor's Note: She and Dean talk about building the dome in this video produced by their son, Luz.}

How was that first winter?

It was a rough, snowy winter, but everything was new and sparkling. It was just extraordinary. It was a huge amount of work. We worked so hard and we would then put on some music and dance and try to forget we'd been working so hard.

Is that the same dome you go back to now?

No, Dean has that dome. After ten years, I built a studio and living space for myself in this other beautiful meadow that looks at the Huajatollas. Do you know those mountains? The Spanish Peaks?

I do. I love them.

I look out the window and there they are, really, really beautiful. And I built this pretty much myself. Dean helped, everybody here helped, but as I said, you had to be responsible for building your own space. I have pictures of me in early 1978 digging post holes in the dirt to put piers in for my floor. My son, who was three-and-a-half, held the other end of the measuring tape.

It was the house I wanted and it was just the way I wanted it. One big room, 20 feet by 32 feet, with 10-foot ceilings all oriented southeast. There is a smaller, two-story faceted section off the east-end off this big room, with a kitchen below and a bedroom above.

The sun comes up in the morning and hits the southeast facing windows and warms the bedroom and kitchen. I come down and have breakfast and by then the sun will be in the studio. And you don't use any heat in the day unless there's a snowstorm or something in this house. It just works; it's totally passive solar.

That’s amazing.

I learned that from being here for 10 years and just being able to watch the light and watch the land. I also built a model so I could see exactly where the sun's going to be and where it will hit.

How was your connection to the local community?

We were totally ignorant of how to live in the country. We were all college educated people from all over the place, but we didn't know how to do anything. And the locals were so incredible. One man showed us how to irrigate. And people would teach us what plants were edible and would just give us the most amazing information. I don't know where we would ever get that information again because all those people are gone and their kids didn't stay. It was quite extraordinary.

What keeps you connected to this place? What keeps you coming back to Libre?

I'm close to a number of people here, and the community, but I'm close to this land. I'm really, really close to this land. I love this land. I love every pine, every blade of grass. I feel like I've learned how to see here. I learned about the sky, looking at the stars. I’ve learned about the plants, animals, rocks, fossils. I've learned so much from this land.

You and Michael also have a place in Nevada. How did that happen?

My husband, who's a painter, an extraordinary painter, that's a landscape that he loves. And he had a place in Nevada when we met, and I had this place in Libre. That's how we ended up in this complicated situation of having too many places. And we have a place in California, which is where we both lived when we met.

Do you have the same feelings for your land in Nevada?

I do, but it is very different. It's very, very different. It’s not a community and that makes a huge difference. You're really alone; you're really, really, really out there. It's the least human-centric place I've ever been. It's bugs and lizards and rabbits and deer, but it’s mostly bugs, and you can hear them just munching away. You can see the geology. You can see 10,000 years ago. You can just look at it right in front of you. Time and space really become one. It's quite extraordinary.

Does having three different homes help or hinder how you think about community and what it means to belong somewhere?

It’s … it’s hindered in a number of ways. I see people who stay in the same place all of the time, and you don't think about going anywhere else. You just stay there. And that, in some ways, seems like it could be really nice because it's hard going back and forth between places and packing and driving. But I couldn't possibly trade it because I'm so close to each of these places. I couldn't possibly give one up. They'll have to be wrenched from my cold, dead hand. I love being in them. They each offer something completely different.

Is one of them “home” to you?

That's like asking my favorite color, you know? I feel so privileged, except for the fact that we built everything. We physically built it. We didn't have money. We just built stuff we were lucky enough to live in. I like to say my misspent youth turned out to be a good investment.

Something you did when you were so young dominates so much of your biography. What is it like to have that be such a part of you all the time?

It's allowed me to go and do new things. It allowed me to live in the early days without having to sell much art. When I first moved to San Francisco, I would go to the post office to mail packages, and I'd see people there getting their mail because they didn't have a home. That was their general delivery. And I kept thinking, that could be me, except I have a home in the mountains. Libre gave me incredible courage, knowing it was here. It has also had a profound impact on what I now know I am capable of doing.

I come from a blue collar family who did everything themselves. But my husband and I hired contractors to help us rehab this beautiful old house in Detroit. It’s been an interesting identity switch to be in a place where we could hire people instead of physically doing it ourselves.

I work with assistants for my sculpture. I can’t make work that large by myself. I never could, but now I'm not so young. I used to be really spry, but I just am not as strong as I used to be. Last year we had a couple of leaks in the Libre house, and I looked up and saw that some of the nails were pulling up from the corrugated roofing and I thought, Well, jeez, I’ll just go up and replace all those nails with the hexhead screws with the gaskets on them. And I got out the ladder and I went up there and I did it. But, boy, it just about killed me.

Did you tell your son? Did he try to come and murder you for doing that?

I didn’t tell him.

My mother would do the exact same thing and then she would not tell me, either.

It's hard to reconcile that you really can't do that anymore. I look at every nail in this building and I hammered it, you know, every screw, and I can't imagine how I did it.

Is Libre still a community of artists and makers?

It's not the same as it was. There are a lot of people who make things, who paint and sculpt, and who do it more as a personal thing. Except Dean, who continues to paint seriously every day. Most of the people here now grow food. There are some writers.

Are people interested in continuing the legacy of the place?

Oh, yes, we have all our children who we brought in as members, but they live all over the world and in many different professions. We have doctors and lawyers and architects and sound engineers. They are this whole pile of people who have their own really complicated lives. But they love this place and they come here regularly and will be responsible for it.

But we're all getting up there. In a village, you replenish yourself. But we’re not really a village. There are some young people who come and stay for months at a time. It could end up being a residency program and people rotate in and out with a core group who takes care of it.

How has your relationship with the surrounding community evolved?

When we first got here, all the local families were interested in what we were doing and really liked us and came to our parties. They all appreciated that we worked hard and that we accomplished things. But a lot of those people are gone.

There were some people who hated us and hated the fact that we existed at all. They were the kind of closed minded people who didn't have a sense of what we might have in mind and didn't want to take the time to look. They were just reading what was in the newspapers.

But now I'm good friends with the people I've always known. But there aren't many new people that I know, except who I meet at other people's houses.

That’s probably what happens to everybody with age. We form into our communities wherever we live.

It's true. The stages of life have really corresponded to the stages of this community because we were all a certain age when we got here. And also the country. What was happening in the country allowed us to be able to do this, forced us to be able to do this, really, and now it's beyond anything we ever dreamed was going to happen 50 years ago.

Ok, everyone. That's it for this week. Thanks for sticking with me. And please do come back next week for the final installment of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains trilogy. We get into the history and look at how you survive, build community and integrate, or at least co-exist, in a new place. That’s next week on Bar\Heart.

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