Travel Diary: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Santa Fe, New Mexico
By Annaliese Soden, Director of Stewardship and Donor Relations
The stark landscape, indigenous art, and traditional adobe architecture of New Mexico inspired a new direction in the art of Georgia O’Keeffe, whose work is on view at the CMA in the exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern. In 1929 the artist began traveling to New Mexico and would often spend months living and working there, away from the bustle of her New York home. In 1949 she permanently moved to New Mexico, three years after the death of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz.
This past October, a group of CMA donors stepped into O’Keeffe’s world and visited one of the most creative, beautiful, and unique cities: Santa Fe. Travelers were treated to a special insider’s tour with Curator of American Painting and Sculpture Mark Cole joining many of the city’s museum directors and curators, who led the group through some of the most important collections in Santa Fe. The trip was punctuated with a private tour of a top local collector’s home, and a day trip north to Abiquiú and Ghost Ranch — home to many of O’Keeffe’s favorite sites — to experience firsthand the setting and vistas that inspired so many of her paintings.
Renowned for its unique aesthetic, architecture, landscape, and Spanish, Mexican, and Native American heritage, Santa Fe proved to be a fascinating place to visit. A desert oasis 7,000 feet above sea level, the city is surrounded by remarkable cliffs, vibrant light, and far-reaching desert views. The city was once the northernmost outpost of the Spanish empire and is the oldest capital city in North America; most of its downtown is a designated historic district. Among the pueblo-style architecture, Spanish churches, and winding streets, you feel like you’re in a completely different place and time.
The inimitable aesthetic of Santa Fe is present everywhere, and there is an artistic thoughtfulness in seemingly every inch of the city. Santa Fe’s spectacular natural setting, extraordinary history, and diverse visual arts spanning ancient traditions to the contemporary era lived up to its moniker: a city different. As a leader in fine art, folk art, craft, and design, Santa Fe was notably the first in America to be designated a “Creative City” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.
Day 1
The tour began with a morning walk through the Santa Fe Plaza for an early-hours visit to the New Mexico Museum of Art.
The group was welcomed by Director Mary Kershaw in the museum’s pueblo revival–style St. Francis Auditorium — one of Santa Fe’s most revered public spaces.
Kershaw set the foundation for the trip, providing meaningful insight into the distinct arts of the region and the history of the museum, which celebrated its centennial in 2017. Christian Waguespack, the museum’s curator of 20th-century art, led the group on a tour of the permanent collection and special exhibitions, showcasing regional crafts such as traditional Hispanic tinwork and highlighting the role of artist communities in New Mexico, including works by the Taos Society of Artists, Los Cinco Pintores, Transcendental Painting Group, Rio Grande Painters, and the Stieglitz circle. The adjacent New Mexico History Museum set the historical and anthropological groundwork critical to understanding the art of the region; insight into the heritage of New Mexico and the Southwest allowed the travelers to gain a great appreciation for Santa Fe’s diverse cultures and traditions.
In the afternoon the group visited the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and was welcomed by Curator of Fine Art Ariel Plotek before exploring the most extensive holdings of O’Keeffe’s work including 140 oil paintings, nearly 700 drawings, and hundreds of additional pieces by the artist dating from 1901 to 1984. The day concluded with a visit to SITE Santa Fe, the contemporary art museum located in the Railyard Arts District. The space hosts regional, national, and international exhibitions and boasts being the first to organize an international biennial of contemporary art in the United States.
Day 2
The day began by exploring Santa Fe’s impressive shops and galleries. Travelers took part in a guided shopping experience focused on pottery, jewelry, and textiles as well as a tour of the city’s many prominent galleries, including Nedra Matteucci Galleries, Aaron Payne Fine Art, and Peyton Wright Gallery. We had lunch at the Santa Fe School of Cooking, which held a class featuring much-loved recipes from Georgia O’Keeffe’s kitchen. Carol Merrill, who met O’Keeffe in 1975, became her librarian, secretary, cook, nurse, companion, and friend. She joined the group for lunch and read stories from Weekends with O’Keeffe (2010), a book based on her extensive journal account of their interactions, and O’Keeffe, Days in a Life (1996), Merrill’s book of poetry.
A visit to an awe-inspiring private home in the hills near the Santa Fe Opera that belongs to Bill Miller started off the afternoon.
His collection of contemporary works of art, stunning furniture, and Native American parfleche was a special experience for all. The home’s seemingly endless views of the Jemez and Sangre Cristo Mountains were equally spectacular.
In the evening the group visited a remarkable installation by Meow Wolf, the somewhat indescribable art collective established in 2008. Situated in a former bowling alley, Meow Wolf is an art- and technology-filled two-story, 20,000-square-foot space in the guise of a Victorian house, full of secret passageways — including refrigerators and washing machines, a cave system, and extended virtual reality via narrative portals. Meow Wolf’s repertoire of artists includes more than 300 participants creating across many media including sculpture, music, audio, performance, architecture, and video production.
Day 3
The final day of the trip began with a morning tour of Museum Hill, located just off the Santa Fe Trail dominating Camino Lejo. Four museums dedicated to serving a distinct cultural mission reside here. First, the group visited the Museum of International Folk Art, which houses the world’s largest collection of such work.
Director Khristaan Villela and Curator of Latin American and Caribbean Collections Amy Groleau guided the group through the unorthodox permanent exhibition Multiple Visions: A Common Bond. Drawn largely from the collection of Alexander and Susan Girard, the exhibition showcases an immense collection representing folk art from one hundred countries across six continents in an incredible array of displays and vignettes.
Rounding off the morning was a visit to the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC), which serves as the exhibition center for Native American arts of the Southwest.
Charged with preserving, conserving, and curating New Mexico’s extensive native arts collection, the museum and nearby Laboratory of Anthropology Library, founded by John D. Rockefeller, serve as a center of stewardship, knowledge, and understanding of the artistic, cultural, and intellectual achievements of the diverse native peoples of the Southwest. MIAC director Della Warrior led the group through the museum’s vast holdings of textiles, pottery, baskets, jewelry, paintings, and extraordinary artifacts.
In the afternoon the group continued about 60 miles north of Santa Fe to Abiquiú and Ghost Ranch. A private tour of O’Keeffe’s historic adobe home and studio in Abiquiú offered travelers the incredible opportunity to walk in the environment in which she lived and worked.
The house inspired so many of her paintings, and the group was captivated standing in front of the patio door that she painted more than 20 times. Similarly, the blooming cottonwood trees lining the Chama River Valley behind her studio were a regular subject; they were wonderful to witness in person.
Continuing northwest where the landscape dramatically changes, the trip ended in Ghost Ranch, a place very special to O’Keeffe and her work.
O’Keeffe spent many summers there while living in New York. She was known to regularly explore its 21,000 acres and paint its unique red hills and mesas. She bought a piece of land there in 1940 and eventually split her time between Ghost Ranch and her Abiquiú home.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern is on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Gallery through March 3.
For more information on CMA-led travel, please contact the Stewardship Department.
Annaliese Soden, Director of Stewardship and Donor Relations, asoden@clevelandart.org
Maria Carbonell, Stewardship Specialist, mcarbonell@clevelandart.org
