Honoring a dear friend

James Hubbell, 1931-2024

I am mourning the departure of my friend and colleague James Hubbell, who passed away on May 17th. I met James in 1984 when I interviewed him for a book I was writing at the time. I visited his home in Julian, CA, where over a long period of time he custom built his home, several studios, art storage facilities, and a space for gatherings. He also founded a nonprofit with his wife Anne. You can learn more about it here.

Since 1984, James and I have made a point to see each other at least once a year. Usually, we would gather at Rancho La Puerta, Mexico (where we did our first project together in 1990) to spend a week resting and talking. The project, called Kuchumaa Passage in honor of the mountain hovering above the valley, was an experiment to test the possibility of working with individuals who were strangers to create something beautiful and meaningful together. 

James and I at Kuchumaa Passage in 1990, exhausted after 10 days of designing and building.

We worked with 12 volunteers to design and build the project in 10 days. It worked beautifully, so much so that I adopted a similar approach to my nonprofit Pomegranate Center’s work with communities. This marked the beginning of the Gathering Places program which eventually saw the completion of over sixty such projects. (Several years ago my daughter Anya wrote a guest post on here about my friendship with James and our trip down to the Kuchumaa build - you can read it here.)

Every time Jim and I met, we would do watercolors together. To an outside observer, it may have looked like we were making some serious art. Actually, we laughed as we were competing to see who could do more watercolors in an hour. I think art makes it possible for levity and depth to coexist. As we worked, we touched upon deep topics: balance, negative space, hard & soft, trusting the brushstrokes to tell us what to do next, incorporating mistakes into our work, wet on wet, and breaking the rules. It is amazing how few words we needed as we made art. We were expressing ideas, not discussing them. I took this sentiment into my work with communities. We would limit the discussion to liberate more time for doing things together. 

James and I studying our afternoon works at Rancho la Puerta. Photo by Matt D’Arrigo

In this mindset, ideas and actions coexist. They are the same. And James and I enjoyed this state of being so much that James would inevitably say “this is so much fun it should be illegal.” 

Before I started the Pomegranate Center, I was a recovering artist, trying to figure out how to navigate a rapidly changing world. Much of modern art is about disassembling, highlighting increasingly smaller aspects of the visual world leading to abstracted compositions with a spotlight on patterns or textures. I was a part of that artistic “disassembling” in my early years with OHO. But here was James fitting things back together. He would make buildings, walls, doors, floors, and furniture all as parts of the same artistic pattern. Nothing is undeserving of artistic attention. He and I concluded that our lives are better if we infuse art into everyday life. Art spills into everything. 

After so much of our world has been disassembled and broken, James’ legacy shows us how we might put it all back together again. Thank you, James. You will be missed.

photo by Matt D’Arrigo