NEW MEXICO, DAY 3: ABIQUIU AND GHOST RANCH

 June 27, 2021

We spent the morning of Day 3 in what we called "Georgia O'Keeffe Territory." As mentioned in the prior post, O'Keeffe owned two homes in New Mexico. We stopped at the second one she bought first, was a crumbling adobe on three acres in  the village of Abiquiu (pronounced A-bih-cue) when she purchased it. She remodeled it extensively, and it became her principal residence in 1949 after her husband died. She lived there until 1984, two years before her death in 1986. The name "Abiquiu" means "wild choke cherry place" in the Tewa language.

We got there pretty early in the morning before anything was open. Unfortunately, advance tickets are required to take a tour of the O'Keeffe property, which was declared a National Historical Landmark in 1998. Tours of the O'Keeffe home on the property are not available right now because of Covid, and we couldn't even find the actual house on the property, which nowadays is dominated by the Abiquiu Inn and what looks like upscale cabins/casitas for rent.

However, as we drove around the property, we discovered that it also serves as an outdoor art gallery, with most of the art for sale! We had a good time checking out the various pieces, such as Water Garden by Brenda Jones:

NEW MEXICO, DAY 2: GEORGIA O'KEEFFE MUSEUM IN SANTA FE

June 26, 2021

One of the museums I was most excited to visit on this trip was the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. It's common to visit an art museum that focuses on a genre or time period, but less common to visit an art museum that focuses on the life work of a single artist. 

O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929 at age 42. She bought a home there in 1937 and a second one in 1945. New Mexico became her permanent home in 1949 (three years after the death of her husband) and she lived there until she died 37 years later in 1986.

Santa Fe's Georgia O'Keeffe Museum opened in 1997, eleven years after O'Keeffe's death. The building itself has the Santa Fe/Southwest adobe construction that is so prevalent in the area. The collection includes many of her best-known works, along with many others I would have never guessed were hers.

There are hundreds of paintings on display, just part of the collection that rotates among the galleries. I present my favorites, not in chronological order, but in the order I viewed them at the museum (and in the approximate order they are displayed, which is more or less thematically and definitely not chronologically). Occasionally as we walked through the galleries we read some interesting narrative that I will include bits and pieces of. 

"In 1915, while teaching art at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina, Georgia O'Keeffe made a radical decision. As she later explained: 'I have my things in my head that are not like waht anyone has taught me. . . . so I decided to start anew.' The bold drawings that resulted, infused with energy and emotion, were some of the world's first 'pure abstractions.' . . . Her abstractions were first exhibited in New York in 1916 at Alfred Stieglitz's avant-garde gallery '291.' By the mid-1920s, O'Keeffe was recognized as one of America's most important artists."

"In 1923, Stieglitz began organizing annual solo exhibitions of O'Keeffe's work. The following year, they were married."

Corn, No. 2 (1924)

Bella Donna (1939)