Interviews, Issue 6

In Minds Of: Georgia O’Keeffe

Discussion on Georgia O'Keeffe’s approach to abstraction, and how the museum engages audiences and tells her full story.

Words MARCUS CIVIN

After she died, following her instructions, the ashes of that famous painter of flowers, Georgia O’Keeffe, were scattered in Northern New Mexico. In a late-in-life, on-camera interview, O’Keeffe, lean and windblown, remarked about her chosen resting place, “As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly. It’s something that is in the air. It’s just different. The sky is different. The stars are different. The wind is different.” Before she moved there from New York, O’Keeffe wrote to Mabel Dodge Luhan, who already lived in New Mexico and would become a friend: “Kiss the sky for me—You laugh—but I loved the sky out there.”

Lyrical, forceful, and intimate, Georgia O’Keeffe’s drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs have come to define for many the American Southwest—its rocks, bones, brush, twisty trees, feathers, mountains, road, and sky. “All the earth colors of the painter’s palette are out there,” she told a writer for an arts magazine in 1931, “The light Naples yellow through the orchres—orange and red and purple earth—even the soft earth greens.” Then, she lamented how everyone wanted her to only paint flowers even as she gazed out on her other adopted splendors, “You have no association with those hills—our wasteland—I think our most beautiful county—you may not have seen it, so you want me always to paint flowers.”

This spring, I interviewed Ariel Plotek, a recent Curator of Fine Art at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in New Mexico, and the museum’s director Cody Hartley. We discussed the artist’s enduring and widening appeal, her approach to abstraction, and how the museum engages audiences and tells her full story—even where that story contains or runs side-by-side with inequity, colonization, and displacement.

MARCUS CIVIN: For people who have not been to the O’Keeffe in Santa Fe or her home and studio in Abiquiú, can you talk us through what they would find in these spaces if they visited?

CODY HARTLEY: In Abiquiú, you experience the home she built and lived in for more than 35 years. O’Keeffe took a decaying adobe hacienda and made it a modern home by putting in large windows and opening up the rooms. This was not O’Keeffe’s first home, but in it, she achieved the height of her ideas about how to live. You can see her vision, a way of living with intentionality and thoughtfulness. The home looks much as it looked when O’Keeffe lived there. We worked hard to preserve it. We also care for the home in Ghost Ranch. It is not yet open to the public. This was O’Keeffe’s first home in New Mexico. It is a bit smaller, more isolated, and remote, but we do aspire to open it in the future. Abiquiú was where she had an orchard and a lush vegetable garden. It was the home where she would entertain more often. Ghost Ranch was where she would escape from the world. The larger Ghost Ranch property surrounding her home is owned by the Presbyterian Church and operated as a retreat center. O’Keeffe had an in-holding of about ten acres. If you’re in that home, you can’t see anyone else or anything else besides the glorious landscape.

The space I find most remarkable and resonant, though, is the studio at Abiquiú. It’s a large, rectangular room. It has a simple ceiling, white walls, and a giant plate glass window looking out over the Chama River Valley. The view is amazing! You can see the White Place, or Plaza Blanca, where O’Keeffe loved to walk. What’s even more powerful to me than the view is the idea that from this space, all of this art emerged. I see O’Keeffe’s artworks all over the world, and so many of them started in this room.

MC: O’Keeffe was famously romantic about the desert. How does the museum engage with the world outside O’Keeffe’s windows, with New Mexico and New Mexicans?

CH: One could have justifiably created the museum in New York or Wisconsin, where she was born. But it was this landscape and the communities in this place that fed her creativity and spirit. She, in turn, helped popularize the idea of the desert as a place of beauty. Our responsibility is to tell that story, but in partnership with our neighbors—recognizing, not shying away from, how this history contains conflict. It contains inequity, displacement, and colonization. We can’t avoid those topics. We can’t romanticize that past, but we can tell the history collaboratively and focus on opportunities to build a better future for all without ignoring or being blind to the realities of the past.

We are an arts organization, but we’re fortunate to have visibility. O’Keeffe is a household name. So, we’re asking how we can use that visibility to help our neighbors achieve their visions and support their well-being. What is our role in education in New Mexico? What is our role in economic development? In a community like Abiquiú, how do we ensure that the 15,000 or 20,000 visitors a year that go to the home and studio are a positive presence in the community? At a basic level, we have to demonstrate our respect for this place and the people of this place through our actions. I think about a comment that one of the members of the community in Abiquiú used in describing O’Keeffe, “She lived lightly on the land.” I think that should be our goal as well.

I’m also thinking about the artist’s reputation 20, 50, or 100 years from now. How does her example continue to have meaning for future generations? O’Keeffe loved technology. I think she would have been an early adopter of a lot of what we see today. She embraced the new. That was a tenet of Modernism. She had every gadget. She was incredibly savvy about the media. She understood the scope and reach of print journalism. She understood how to market her art and her career. On the most practical level, she understood the bold, graphic nature of her works reproduced well in the technologies widely available at that time. I think she was not afraid of change. I can think of at least three stereo systems she had in three different locations.

MC: I think that the museum is working on an expansion. Can you tell us what’s developing?

CH: It is an exciting moment for the museum. We celebrated our 25th anniversary this year. When we opened in the summer of 1997, we were a much smaller institution. Over the first decade, we grew the collection dramatically, opened the research center, and created our education annex. We got ownership of the Ghost Ranch House in those first years and then the Abiquiú house in 2006. Now, we’re still catching up with that growth. We have about 5,000 square feet of gallery space in our existing building. We are preparing to build a 55,000-square-foot facility. The larger goal is [positioning] this institution in a way that serves the people of New Mexico as well as our visitors from out of state.

New Mexico is a beautiful but hard place. We have struggles in terms of our economy, child welfare, and education. There are people across the state who are dedicated to improving our communities. We need to be a part of that. The new building becomes a platform for that work. We have more space now to bring in the voices of other artists. Equally important, the new building has classrooms. It has event space. There are other projects that I think will go beyond the building. The building serves as the anchor for our art truck that will take art supplies and classroom materials to communities throughout New Mexico.

There will be a beautiful garden and a glorious green space that will serve as the entrance to the new building. It will be filled with native plants and designed to be ecologically responsible in terms of rainwater harvest and reuse and climate-appropriate plantings. It will also be a public amenity. There’s very little green space in downtown Santa Fe. We’re opening up what was a private garden and making it a public space. I am committed to supporting people using this space even if they’re not visiting the museum.

MC: I can see that. How else do you imagine the museum in the future?

CH: Our viability is directly tied to O’Keeffe’s meaning and resonance for future generations. We have to ensure that her story is relevant. Even though I’m an art historian, art history is not the entry point for everyone. We have to allow people to find significance and meaning in her example on their own terms. Museums are not always the most welcoming, friendly places. I still have some trepidation when I walk up the stairs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We need to overcome that, and I think one of the best ways to do that is to reach outward rather than expecting everyone to come to us. O’Keeffe was a lifelong teacher. Professionally, she taught in her late 20s and early 30s but never let go of teaching. People reached out to her. She embraced them. She supported their ambition. She encouraged them to pursue their passions. Yayoi Kusama wrote O’Keeffe this very tender letter saying she wanted to be an artist, and O’Keeffe told her what she had to do. To this day, Kusama talks about the importance of that encouragement. In other cases, it was children in Abiquiú she encouraged. She said they needed to go to college, and she would help them. She didn’t want anyone to know. She would often set up a loan, but then she would forgive the loan later. We don’t know how often she did that because she kept it quiet. It was never going to be about her. It was about helping an individual in an important moment. A team member who takes care of the property talks about how, as a young woman from a conservative community, it was O’Keeffe who said she could do anything she wanted. You can be anyone. That’s powerful at a young age. Very powerful.