Georgia O’Keeffe: Abiquiu Views

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has announced a series of presentations featuring works inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s two residences in Northern New Mexico. The first of these exhibits, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abiquiu Views,” opened in Santa Fe on February 7, 2014. It features more than a dozen images of the cottonwoods that grow along the Chama River, a subject she painted repeatedly from the late 1940s through the 1950s, with other views from her home and studio at Abiquiu. Over the course of the year, the Museum will explore O’Keeffe’s use of her residence as a source for her artwork. The exhibits include her original studio worktable, arranged with her art materials and personal effects. Subsequent presentations in April, May, and September will focus on her garden, the iconic patio with the black door, and the landscape surrounding her home at Ghost Ranch.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Cottonwood Tree in Spring, 1943, Oil on canvas, 30 x 36 (76.2 x 91.4). Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Gift of The Burnett Foundation. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Georgia O’Keeffe owned two adobe Pueblo Revival homes in the high-desert plateau of Northern New Mexico. She split her time between the two residences, spending summer and fall at the Ghost Ranch, purchased in 1940, and winter and spring and at her four-acre residence in the village of Abiquiu, purchased in 1945. O’Keeffe painted the views from the homes, but the structures themselves were also an outlet for her aesthetic expression; over the course of the more than four decades that she lived in these residences, her modern sensibility informed the way she shaped and inhabited the spaces of her homes.

c. 1952 oil: Cottonwoods

By bringing together paintings inspired by her residences, some seen for the first time in many decades, this series of exhibitions examines the significance of the homes as part of her artistic practice. “In addition to her artwork, the Museum holds O’Keeffe’s New Mexico homes and contents as part of its extended collection,” said Carolyn Kastner, curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. “Her homes and the way she lived in them comprise two of her greatest creative efforts, conceived and perfected to suit her artistic practice.” The exhibitions complement the recent Museum publication, Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Houses: Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu.

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