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Landmark New Mexicans: The living legacy of Georgia O'Keeffe

By Tamara N. Shope
Friday, November 23, 2007

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"Did you know," one of the girls asked me, "that Georgia O'Keeffe didn't like kids?"

I'd heard that, I told her, feeling uneasy about how to tell an 8-year-old there's a rumor the most popular girl in New Mexico wouldn't like her. How does that make you feel?

Sad. It was a chorus of eight little voices mumbling the same word.

Don't worry, announced one of the girls, tall and confident. She'd like us.

That was Isabella Stork, 10, who says she enjoys art more than ever now that she's well versed in the ways of O'Keeffe. She likes talking about brush strokes and oils and canvases. She's in the fifth grade now.

When she was younger, a mere second-grader, she painted a mural the size of a cinder block inspired by the legendary artist.

Actually, they all did. Every wall in the foyer between second-grade classrooms is covered in tiny murals. Some are landscapes. Some are flowers. Some are skulls. Some are portraits — most of a grayed woman with a bun and a black dress looking to the side as if she's sizing something up.

These children go to Georgia O'Keeffe Elementary, a Northeast Heights school where art lives and breathes and plays every day along with the students there.

Here, O'Keeffe's legacy is tangible.

It looks wide-eyed and rosy-cheeked. It smiles sheepishly. It gets excited over animal bones, big flowers and broad, colorful landscapes. It celebrates an artist by creating more art. And this living legacy does this even though it thinks Georgia O'Keeffe herself probably wouldn't have been interested.

• • •

Truth is, Georgia O'Keeffe, born in 1887 in true-to-its-name Sun Prairie, Wis., relished solitude. She liked big, empty spaces. She liked quiet. When she painted, she did so alone.

But she was also drawn to things that were interesting. She kept company with fellow artists, with photographers (including Ansel Adams), with adventurers (the Lindberghs vacationed at her Ghost Ranch home a time or two). She liked craggy trees and vivid colors and the intricacies of bones.

She found these things in New Mexico, which enchanted her during a road trip in the summer of 1917.

O'Keeffe eventually bought a pair of houses in New Mexico, where she'd retreat when city life began to overwhelm her. Later, when her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, died, she made New Mexico her permanent address, moving away from the bustle of New York.

Her house in Abiquiu has become a hot, if hard to get to, tourist spot. And it's here where the small-framed painter, with her mischievous arched eyebrows and long, well-worn fingers, is something of a rock star.

The house itself is easy to find. It sits at the top of a cliff, overlooking farmland and the curious winding road to Española she liked so much.

But if you're wanting to step inside, well, that's not quite as easy.

It'll cost you $30 in check form, please mail a month in advance. That's the word from the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, which is charged with such matters. You'll be escorted to the house in a shuttle that leaves from the Abiquiu Inn about a half mile down the road. It's better that way, I'm told, because it discourages folks from bothering the neighbors with questions and traffic and the snapping of camera shutters.

Three times a week, a dozen or so people pile into the shuttles. They hear about this painter who fell in love with the West even while her home was back East. They crane their necks for that first glimpse of the house, up on that cliff, peeking out between thick layers of trees.

Georgia O'Keeffe's Abiquiu is a small town on a small hill. It rises above the Chama River Valley and faces red cliffs and white rocks. The shuttle, once it's over the incline, comes to the first house on the left. That's O'Keeffe's place, surrounded by willow trees and adobe walls and the occasional No Trespassing sign.

Faces press against the bus window glass for a better view.

Some of the faces are streaked with tears. The tourists can't believe they are at O'Keeffe's house, her sanctuary.

Happens all the time, Judy Lopez, the house manager, tells me. Or she says something like that. I wasn't allowed to write it down. I wasn't allowed to write any of it down. Well, any of it after her explanation: The ambience and the experience of the house is lost when we have that going on.

By that, Lopez means photography, recording devices (video or audio) and note-taking. I was allowed to carry my car keys, my wallet and my wonder.

Lopez is charged with ushering tourists through O'Keeffe's property, where O'Keeffe lived most of the last years of her life. She died in Santa Fe in 1986. The tour usually consists of the massive (relative to Abiquiu) garden area, the sparse but well-kept kitchen and pantry, the courtyard, called a plazuela.

The places where things really happened — where she painted and wondered and entertained — all have real adobe floors, and thus cannot abide the shuffling of tourist feet. (The kitchen is marked by linoleum, and the occasional wandering lizard.)

If those weeping tourists had gone into the living room, though, they'd have seen a glimpse of a woman far ahead of her time. She had installed a sort of stereo surround-sound system. She liked mod furnishings.

Her dining tables were shabby chic, made of plywood and saw horses. She was deep into green living and organic farming. She appreciated natural light and had giant windows installed in her 300-year-old home.

She liked simple things and quirky things. (A friend sent her a rattlesnake skeleton. She had it set in a case and laid into the adobe seating area in her living room.) She liked to be alone, and her furniture is a testament: adobe couches and mod chairs don't invite anyone to linger.

But the weeping tourists don't see those things. Maybe they don't need to. Perhaps standing in her courtyard is enough for them.

From there, they see the sky as she saw it — deeper and wider and bluer than anywhere in the world.

From there, they see an animal skull with long and curly horns that O'Keeffe painted and was pictured beneath. From there, they see she had a fondness for bonsai, and she manicured a shrub in the center of the plazuela in the way of the Asian art. From there, they see the door that drew her to the house in the first place, the door she said took her more than a decade to own for herself.

And it's from that courtyard that you can feel it: This is O'Keeffe's turf. You'll see what she wants you to see, the way she wants you to see it.

• • •

O'Keeffe is renowned for being the first famous female landscape painter, a fact that University of New Mexico associate professor Kirsten Buick attributes to time spent in the Land of Enchantment.

"Her legacy in terms of art is directly related to the refuge she found in New Mexico," Buick says. "Away from New York. Away from what she called the city men, as well as the regionalists. She was able to carve out a space for herself here unlike any other woman."

O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu homes became her muses.

Buick explained to me why O'Keeffe's womanhood, her brush strokes, her business sense, all played into building her legacy.

"It (landscape painting) is normally the province of people who owned the land, and that was normally white males," Buick says.

"You do have examples of African-American landscape painters, but before Georgia O'Keeffe, there were no women represented. And that's directly tied to New Mexico; it becomes this alternative space for her to really try out something that was male dominated."

Landscapes, just behind the Constitution, are where Buick says America finds its identity.

"I make sure my students understand her legacy in landscape painting," says Buick, whose specialty at UNM is in American art.

O'Keeffe had painted the deep red rocks to the west of her Ghost Ranch house. She hiked among the shrubs and cliffs and snakes for better vantage points. She wanted to present New Mexico, wide open and colorful.

Buick, a child of gray and cold Chicago, never knew O'Keeffe's colors. She couldn't imagine that the places O'Keeffe painted actually existed. Turns out, O'Keeffe had become one of New Mexico's best ambassadors.

"When I was able to see Abiquiu and the sun and the landscapes," Buick begins, "I saw these landscapes and thought, 'There's no place on earth that could look like that.'

"But when I moved here, I realized she hadn't done New Mexico justice."

Fledgling artists and their studios now dot Abiquiu. This time of year, thick layers of yellow and orange line the Chama River Valley, and women in broad hats hold paintbrushes against the horizon and push color onto the canvases before them.

This landscape, O'Keeffe made it famous. The mountains that surround tiny Abiquiu, they were hers. She claimed them in her heart. It was off one of them, Cerro Pedernal, that she is said to have had her ashes scattered when she died. At her request, there was no memorial service — just O'Keeffe and her mountain.

• • •

Back at Georgia O'Keeffe Elementary, eight kids are taking turns telling me how they notice the little things in life more now that they've studied O'Keeffe's flower paintings.

"Something's not just red," said 10-year-old Emily Romero, who hopes to one day be an interior designer. "It's red with a little bit of purple."

Second-grade teachers Monet Korbis and Shelly Montoya make sure every kid who sits in their classroom learns a thing or two about — and from — O'Keeffe. Learning about art and how to see things differently will help the kids as they grow up, Korbis says.

"There's always a part of Georgia O'Keeffe in the kids that leave," she says.

Her students know where and when O'Keeffe was born. They know she was a bit of a loner and might not have wanted to spend a whole lot of time with them, even though she was once a teacher. They know she tried different media — charcoal and clay and watercolor and oils.

"And she didn't care if people liked it or not," says Josh Hoeg, 10. "She wanted people to be inspired by it."

It seems that for O'Keeffe, life does indeed imitate art.