Georgia O'Keeffe and the Faraway: Nature and Image
May 11, 2012 - May 5, 2013
“When I got to New Mexico that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. It fitted to me exactly.”
- Georgia O’Keeffe 1977
Georgia O’Keeffe had a lifelong passion for nature and felt a particular kinship and spiritual connection with the Southwestern landscape. From her first prolonged stay in New Mexico in 1929, she drew inspiration from this unique environment, and it continued to offer her boundless resources and inspiration for her art to the end of her life. Experiencing nature directly was an essential part of O’Keeffe’s experience in the Southwest, and she walked often amidst the colorful cliffs and hills of the extensive painted desert surrounding her Ghost Ranch house that she purchased in 1940. Camping was also an important means of spending time in and painting the unusual landscape configurations that interested O’Keeffe, and this exhibition explores its importance to her life and art.
O’Keeffe explored what she called “the faraway” in paintings of the landscape surrounding her Ghost Ranch house that were recurrent and important themes in her work. She also sought out more distant and isolated places as subjects in her work, and some became her favorite camping destinations. Most notably was what she called the “Black Place” about 150 miles west of the Ghost Ranch house, an area of barren and exotic black landscape forms. She also camped at the “White Place,” which was across from the village of Abiquiu and whose spikey white cliffs inspired several paintings. Although she had camped before living in the Southwest, the confluence of its beauty, her love of nature, and the experience of camping proved essential to the significant body of work she created that conveys her extraordinary ability to claim the area as her own: it is now known as Georgia O’Keeffe Country.
The exhibition includes some of the many paintings and drawings she made of the Southwestern landscape as well as photographs of her camping trips to the “Black Place” with her friend and colleague, Maria Chabot. She discovered this area in the 1930s and returned to it frequently to paint in the 1940s. As she pointed out in 1943: “Such a beautiful–untouched lonely feeling place – such a fine part of what I call the ‘faraway.’ It is a place I have painted before but I wanted to do again - and even now I must do again.” There are also images of O’Keeffe walking at the “White Place” and paintings she made of Glen Canyon that were inspired by numerous camping/ rafting trips she made down the Colorado River in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as photographs of her taken there by Eliot Porter and Todd Webb. It also includes a recently made panorama photograph of the “Black Place” as well as a reconstruction of O’Keeffe’s and Chabot’s camping site made up of the camping gear that she and Chabot used and that Chabot bequested to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum at her death in 2001. It comes to us from the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, Fort Worth, Texas. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum worked in partnership with the exhibition curator, Valerie Ann Leeds and former Cowgirl Museum Curator, Patricia Dixon, to realize this groundbreaking exhibition that opened at the Cowgirl Museum in 2010. The exhibition catalogue will be available in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum store.
“When I got to New Mexico that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. It fitted to me exactly.”
- Georgia O’Keeffe 1977
Georgia O’Keeffe had a lifelong passion for nature and felt a particular kinship and spiritual connection with the Southwestern landscape. From her first prolonged stay in New Mexico in 1929, she drew inspiration from this unique environment, and it continued to offer her boundless resources and inspiration for her art to the end of her life. Experiencing nature directly was an essential part of O’Keeffe’s experience in the Southwest, and she walked often amidst the colorful cliffs and hills of the extensive painted desert surrounding her Ghost Ranch house that she purchased in 1940. Camping was also an important means of spending time in and painting the unusual landscape configurations that interested O’Keeffe, and this exhibition explores its importance to her life and art.
O’Keeffe explored what she called “the faraway” in paintings of the landscape surrounding her Ghost Ranch house that were recurrent and important themes in her work. She also sought out more distant and isolated places as subjects in her work, and some became her favorite camping destinations. Most notably was what she called the “Black Place” about 150 miles west of the Ghost Ranch house, an area of barren and exotic black landscape forms. She also camped at the “White Place,” which was across from the village of Abiquiu and whose spikey white cliffs inspired several paintings. Although she had camped before living in the Southwest, the confluence of its beauty, her love of nature, and the experience of camping proved essential to the significant body of work she created that conveys her extraordinary ability to claim the area as her own: it is now known as Georgia O’Keeffe Country.
The exhibition includes some of the many paintings and drawings she made of the Southwestern landscape as well as photographs of her camping trips to the “Black Place” with her friend and colleague, Maria Chabot. She discovered this area in the 1930s and returned to it frequently to paint in the 1940s. As she pointed out in 1943: “Such a beautiful–untouched lonely feeling place – such a fine part of what I call the ‘faraway.’ It is a place I have painted before but I wanted to do again - and even now I must do again.” There are also images of O’Keeffe walking at the “White Place” and paintings she made of Glen Canyon that were inspired by numerous camping/ rafting trips she made down the Colorado River in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as photographs of her taken there by Eliot Porter and Todd Webb. It also includes a recently made panorama photograph of the “Black Place” as well as a reconstruction of O’Keeffe’s and Chabot’s camping site made up of the camping gear that she and Chabot used and that Chabot bequested to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum at her death in 2001. It comes to us from the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, Fort Worth, Texas. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum worked in partnership with the exhibition curator, Valerie Ann Leeds and former Cowgirl Museum Curator, Patricia Dixon, to realize this groundbreaking exhibition that opened at the Cowgirl Museum in 2010. The exhibition catalogue will be available in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum store.
Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico: Architecture, Katsinam, and the Land
Organized by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.
Montclair Art Museum, September 28, 2012 – January 20, 2013 Denver Art Museum, February 10 – April 28, 2013 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, May 17 – September 8, 2013 Heard Museum, September 27, 2013 – January 12, 2014 Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) began spending part of the year living and working in New Mexico in 1929, a pattern she rarely altered until 1949. She then made Northern New Mexico her permanent home three years after the death of Alfred Stieglitz, her husband, celebrated photographer, and America’s first advocate of modern art. O’Keeffe was inspired to paint and draw New Mexico’s distinctive churches, crosses, folk art, Katsinum, as well as the astonishingly beautiful, painted desert that surrounded her Ghost Ranch house. During her first two summers in the area, O’Keeffe stayed in the home of her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan and her husband Tony Lujan, a member of the Taos Pueblo and painted the landscape surrounding Mabel’s property, including the adjacent Taos Pueblo land. Mabel and Tony introduced O’Keeffe to new experiences, such as Tony taking her, along with others, on camping trips to sacred Taos Pueblo lands. She also observed numerous ceremonial dances at, among others, the Taos, Cochiti, and Santo Domingo Pueblos, which she continued to do throughout her life. While the New Mexico landscape remained a prominent part of O’Keeffe’s life and art, especially after she left Taos to live and paint at Alcalde, Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, very little has been known or written about her involvement with Native American art and culture. It is popularly assumed that she had none. But from 1931 to 1945, O'Keeffe created numerous drawings, watercolors, and paintings of Katsinam (carved and painted representations of Hopi spirit beings), but because she retained and seldom exhibited these paintings, they remain generally unknown to the public. “Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico: Architecture, Katsinam, and the Land” includes fifteen rarely seen O’Keeffe pictures of nine different Hopi Katsinam, along with examples of these types of figures or photographs of them. The exhibition establishes a context for these materials by including examples of O’Keeffe’s paintings of New Mexico’s architecture, cultural objects, and her New Mexico landscapes. The exhibition brings to light a relatively unknown component of O’Keeffe’s art and thinking, her awareness of, keen sensitivity toward, and deep respect for the Native American and Hispano cultures of Northern New Mexico. O’Keeffe was not alone in seeking inspiration in New Mexico’s landscape and indigenous cultures. Various modernist artists looked to the area’s unique cultures and geography as a source of imagery that would lend their work a particular American identity that was independent of European modernism. In presenting a selection her landscape and architectural paintings along with her Katsinam works, the exhibition reveals the breadth of O’Keeffe’s interests in the cultures and environment of Northern New Mexico. Co-curators for the exhibition are Barbara Buhler Lynes, Curator, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and The Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center and Carolyn Kastner, Associate Curator. An exhibition catalogue accompanies “Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico” published by the University of New Mexico Press. It includes an introduction by Lynes that discusses O'Keeffe's interest in aspects of Native American and Hispano culture, and another by Kastner, whose essay includes an interview with Dan Namingha and Ramona Sakiestewa and analyzes the cultural complexity of studying and exhibiting Katsinam in the twenty-first century. Alph Secakuku’s essay discusses the role of Katsinam in indigenous religions and ceremonies, and specifically the nine Katsinam depicted in O’Keeffe’s artwork. Another by Jackson Rushing, Professor of Art History at the University of Oklahoma examines O'Keeffe's Katsinam paintings in relation to works by other modern artists who depicted Native American themes. |  Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul’s Kachina, 1931.
Oil on board, 8 x 8 inches. Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. |
