The 50-year friendship between Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams began when they met in Taos, New Mexico, in 1929. It’s no surprise that O’Keeffe, who loved to trek across big country in Texas and New Mexico, took to him. He was an intrepid photographer, clambering over dangerous terrain to make his iconic photographs. (In late […]
Tag Archives | abiquiu
Holiday greetings from Georgia O’Keeffe
“Starlight Night” (1917) featured on Georgia O’Keeffe’s Christmas card in 1963. Georgia O’Keeffe was not religious in the institutional sense, but she was deeply spiritual and certainly enjoyed a good ritual. She usually celebrated Christmas with friends, and sent Christmas cards, including one in 1963 that reproduced her 1917 masterpiece, “Starlight Night” (above). In the […]
Georgia O’Keeffe: houseplant advice
Alongside the very elegant rocks at O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu home, she cared for a collection of container plants, including geraniums and a huge jade plant that she had nurtured from a six-inch pot, providing her with “something green.” In case you have insects on your houseplants, O’Keeffe advised: “Puff cigarette smoke on them.”
Georgia O’Keeffe, like a cat
As a journalist and historian, I bring a perhaps too-healthy skepticism to documentaries and memoirs about O’Keeffe. They suffer, most of them, from nostalgia, or romanticism, or psychological projection. This one manages to be different. Christine Taylor Patten, interviewed by the BBC for a documentary marking the O’Keeffe retrospective at the Tate Modern last year, […]
Before it was “O’Keeffe Country”
As a historian, I am always on the lookout for contemporary documentation, in order to understand what/how things meant in their own day. Somehow I stumbled upon this film about New Mexico by Carl Dudley, an American director and producer well-known for his short travelogues. It was copyrighted in 1947, at the same time that […]
Look around the O’Keeffe house
If you haven’t had the opportunity to visit O’Keeffe Country (or if you have, and want to make a return visit), check out this 360-degree video from the Tate Modern, to mark the O’Keeffe retrospective now on view. The video explores the Abiquiu home and New Mexico surrounds, as well as the retrospective gallery installation. […]
Wall with Green Door
This is one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu patio door images that’s not commonly referenced. Sharyn R. Udall writes in O’Keeffe and Texas (catalog to the exhibit of the same name by the McNay Art Museum in 1998): “Later in the 1940s O’Keeffe restored a ruined New Mexico adobe house in the village of Abiquiu, not […]
Georgia O’Keeffe’s Door
In honor of Women’s History Month 2015, my essay on Georgia O’Keeffe was published in Houston Woman Magazine. Enjoy! What was there to love about the abandoned house perched over route 84, north of Santa Fe by 53 miles? Its adobe walls were cracked and crumbling, the beams fallen, the doors dangling. Much of the […]