Home Is Where Her Art Is

SANTA FE, N.M. —  Every week could be called Art Week in this distinctive southwestern state capital where cultural activities overshadow governmental affairs and the arts are closely tied to commerce. With a population of a mere 60,000, the city has an inordinately large number of artists, museums, galleries, art fairs and Native American craft shops--not to mention the renowned Santa Fe Opera and Chamber Music Festival.

But this week really is Santa Fe Art Week. Featuring a museum ribbon-cutting, gala receptions, exhibition openings, art and photography fairs, art lectures and musical performances, the citywide program is business as usual, only much more so.

The central event is the opening Thursday of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, an exquisitely renovated adobe structure in the city’s historic center. Billed as the first American museum devoted exclusively to a female artist of national stature, the privately funded institution focuses on a figure of mythic proportions with a huge public following. Adding a substantial component to an increasingly active arts scene, the new museum is sure to be a tourist attraction.

“From a Chamber of Commerce point of view, of course it’s a great asset, but the impact of the O’Keeffe museum is broader than that,” said Stuart Ashman, director of Santa Fe’s Museum of Fine Arts. “Santa Fe is a growing community, and this is indicative of the direction the community is taking--not toward smokestacks. In terms of recognizing Georgia O’Keeffe, the museum is long overdue, because she is an iconic figure as a woman painter who had the courage and determination to work in a remote area.”

O’Keeffe, who was born in Wisconsin in 1887, studied art in New York and Chicago. She taught art in Texas but moved to New York in 1918 and married photographer and art entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz in 1924. She first visited New Mexico in 1917 and began making regular trips there in 1929. She bought an abandoned adobe house on three acres in Abiquiu, about 40 miles northwest of Santa Fe, remodeled it and lived there from 1949 to 1984, two years before she died, at 98.

“Going to Abiquiu from Santa Fe was a day trip in a Model A on a dirt road, yet she made paintings that were sold in New York,” Ashman said. “Her museum could be in New York, but people associate her with the West because of her imagery--bleached bones, desert colors, the landscape and the quality of light. She’s larger than life, and when you see the paintings, it’s rightly so. She was just enough ahead of her time, yet not too far out, to bring people along with her.”

Establishing an O’Keeffe museum in New Mexico might seem to be a natural development, particularly since the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation--charged with broadening understanding of her work and making it available to the public--is based in Abiquiu. But the foundation--established in 1989 to help resolve a legal battle between the artist’s longtime assistant and principal heir, Juan Hamilton, and two of O’Keeffe’s relatives--has devoted its efforts to distributing the 400 works in its holding, maintaining O’Keeffe’s house and producing a comprehensive catalog of her work.

The foundation has renovated the house and conducts tours there, but it will be turned over to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Most of the foundation’s art has been disbursed to museums, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The foundation and the National Gallery are jointly producing a catalogue raisonne of O’Keeffe’s work, to be issued in fall 1999.

One of the funders of the publication is the Burnett Foundation of Fort Worth--and therein lies the story of the O’Keeffe museum. Anne Marion, a Texas heiress who is president of the Burnett Foundation and the wife of John Marion, retired chairman of Sotheby’s auction house, became intimately acquainted with O’Keeffe’s work in the 1960s when her mother, Anne Burnett, bought two paintings, “Pelvis Series, Red With Yellow” (1945) and “Horse’s Skull With White Rose” (1931), directly from the artist.

Following her mother’s example while developing her own taste, Anne Marion later purchased additional O’Keeffe paintings, including “White Calla Lily With Red Background” (1928), “Black Hollyhock With Blue Larkspur” (1928) and “Jimson Weed” (1932).

“About four or five years ago, Anne became interested in doing something with O’Keeffe here,” John Marion said in an interview at the new museum. “It seemed to her and to me that it was criminal, almost, that there were no O’Keeffes of any note to be seen in the city.” (The Museum of Fine Arts has 15 relatively minor works by the artist.)

“She had a couple of meetings with the O’Keeffe Foundation about doing a museum or a wing on a museum,” said Marion, speaking for his wife, who declined to be interviewed. “We also had an idea some years ago of a campus for art. The idea was to put Site Santa Fe [a nonprofit contemporary art space], the Santa Fe Art Institute, the O’Keeffes and maybe a small theater all on one campus of 80 or 100 acres, in a park-like setting. We looked at properties all around here, but it never worked out.

“Then about two years ago, [luxury retailer] Stanley Marcus was approached by the Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of New Mexico Foundation to raise money to buy five or six paintings from the O’Keeffe Foundation for the museum downtown. He came to Anne with Ray Dewey, the foundation president, and Tom Livesay, director of the Museum of New Mexico [the administrative umbrella of four state-supported museums] and asked her to help.

“She decided giving money and her paintings to a state museum was not the right thing to do because she would have no control over what happened,” Marion said. “They might need a new highway, and there would go the O’Keeffes. If the museum was going to upgrade its facility and add a wing for the O’Keeffes, where would they get the funding?

“It had too many complications, so she and I devised a public-private partnership and presented it to Tom Livesay and Stuart Ashman. We proposed to fund and put up a Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in cooperation with the Museum of New Mexico system. We would give them most of the gate receipts [75%, as it turned out] and they would help us by publicizing the museum in their magazine and other publications. Their museum memberships would also be good at the O’Keeffe Museum. That went down just fine, and that’s how it got started.”

The Burnett Foundation has put $9.5 million into the project. One essential ingredient was a collection to augment Anne Marion’s small holding. In less than two years the fledgling museum has amassed a collection of about 85 paintings and works on paper and two pieces of sculpture. Several collectors have contributed artworks, but the largest donation by far was a joint gift of 33 pieces from the Burnett and the O’Keeffe foundations.

The adobe building that houses the museum was built as a church; it was transformed in 1990 into the Allene Lapides Gallery, a pristine space known as Santa Fe’s most beautiful gallery. Anne Marion persuaded Lapides to sell the building for an undisclosed sum and then hired New York architect Richard Gluckman to turn it into a museum. He has brought the building up to state-of-the-art museum standards, made a small addition to the space and provided a setting attuned to O’Keeffe’s work.

The result is an elegant, highly refined 13,000-square-foot adobe structure with wall and floor colors adapted from O’Keeffe’s house in Abiquiu. Fragile works on paper will be shown in a windowless gallery; an enclosed patio, to be used for receptions, will display sculpture. Many of the paintings will be installed in a large gallery with a scrim-covered skylight.

“The biggest thrill Anne and I have had was a week ago, when the construction company turned over the galleries to us,” Marion said. “We walked into the big gallery and there were the paintings, lined up against the wall. It just gave me goose bumps to see them after all the work and planning we had done.”

The first show, organized by Juan Hamilton and continuing through Dec. 30, will consist of the museum’s entire O’Keeffe collection and about 20 pieces on loan. In conjunction with the opening, Abrams has published a book, “The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum,” with critical essays, a chronology and reproductions of all works in the collection.

Plans for next year’s exhibition program are still in the works, said museum Director Peter Hassrick. One idea under discussion is to use one gallery for temporary exhibition, say, to compare Paul Strand’s and O’Keeffe’s work in New Mexico.

There is no shortage of scholarly avenues to pursue regarding O’Keeffe and her artistic milieu, Hassrick said:

“The biggest challenge with artists like O’Keeffe is to keep a reality check on them as real people. The institution is not being established to endorse some mythic dimension but to investigate her contribution as an artist. Our job is to interpret what it is about O’Keeffe’s art that’s important.”

Meanwhile, the city is bracing for an onslaught of visitors attracted by the week’s cultural events. The contemporary art crowd is expected to turn out for Site Santa Fe’s second biennial exhibition, “Truce: Echoes of Art in an Age of Endless Conclusions,” Friday through Oct. 12. The show--curated by Francesco Bonami, former editor of Flash Art International, a contemporary art magazine--will feature works by 27 artists from 20 countries.

Site Santa Fe has found a niche in a former beer warehouse transformed by Gluckman. Under the direction of Louis Grachos, the nonprofit institution is known as a high-quality contemporary art showcase that includes local artists in its international program and provides a lively forum for artists and other thinkers. With five artists from the United States (Kevin Hanley, Sharon Lockhart, Chris Moore, Elizabeth Peyton and Rudolf Stingel), four from Italy and one each from Cameroon, Cuba, Estonia and Iceland, among other nations, “Truce” aims to explore current multicultural issues.

Part of Site Santa Fe’s first biennial was staged at the Museum of Fine Arts two years ago; this time around, the museum is tooting its own horn while welcoming the O’Keeffe museum with “80th Anniversary Exhibition: O’Keeffe’s New Mexico.”

Joseph Traugott, curator of 20th century art, has selected 125 works from the museum’s collection in an overview of New Mexican art history from the 1880s to the present. Focusing on “Bear Lake,” a 1931 O’Keeffe landscape that represents a specific location but also symbolizes a region imbued with a spiritual presence, Traugott places O’Keeffe within both a Modernist circle and a milieu of conflicting artistic ideals and cultural traditions. The show opens Thursday and runs through Nov. 2.

Two trade fairs also are on the week’s agenda, both scheduled for Thursday through next Sunday. Santa Fe photography dealer Megan Fox has organized Art Santa Fe 1997, the second version of a biennial event, at Hotel Santa Fe. About 50 modern and contemporary art dealers from the United States, Belgium and Brazil will show their wares in hotel rooms.

The other fair, Photo Santa Fe ‘97, is the creation of Los Angeles photography dealer Stephen Cohen. Cohen’s fair, now in its fifth year, will feature vintage and contemporary photography from the galleries of 30 dealers at the Sweeney Convention Center.

Scholars and devotees of O’Keeffe may prefer to delay their Santa Fe visit to next week, when the new museum is sponsoring “The Georgia O’Keeffe Symposium: The Work and the Life” at the El Dorado Hotel on July 21-22. Coordinator MaLin Wilson has invited about 20 authors, art historians and friends of the artist to present papers and participate on panels.

The symposium will cap the O’Keeffe museum’s inaugural events, but that’s not the end of art news in Santa Fe. Among other happenings, two state-supported museums on the outskirts of the city are planning openings for expanded facilities.

On Aug. 17, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture will launch its Amy Rose Bloch Wing, a $3.5-million structure that adds 21,000 square feet of space for exhibitions, display of the permanent collection and research. Nearly half the space will be devoted to “Here, Now and Always,” a permanent exhibition of 1,500 objects that tells a sweeping story of the history and cultures of the Southwest. The exhibition, incorporating ideas and voices of Native American writers and scholars, is the result of an eight-year collaborative effort.

In fall 1998, the Museum of International Folk Art plans to open its Neutrogena Wing, an 8,000-square-foot space that will house a 2,900-piece collection of textiles, ceramics, baskets and other objects amassed by Lloyd Cotsen, the retired chief executive officer of Neutrogena, who has provided an undisclosed amount of money for the addition and an endowment.

In addition, the College of Santa Fe is at work on a $20-million Visual Arts Center designed by Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta. The Burnett Foundation has given $6.1 million to the college to construct the Anne and John Marion Center for Photographic Arts; build a facility for the Santa Fe Art Institute, currently housed off campus; endow a faculty chair in photographic arts held by the Marion Center’s director; and provide a $2-million challenge grant for the entire project. All this activity reinforces the contention of local cultural leaders that Santa Fe is more than a small town with an oversized art component.

“The art world’s hierarchical sense of importance is a New York-Los Angeles struggle or a New York-Europe struggle,” Ashman said. “We aren’t part of that, but we are a player.”

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* Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 217 Johnson St., Santa Fe. Inaugural show runs Thursday through Dec. 30. (505) 995-0785.

* “Truce: Echoes in an Age of Endless Conclusions,” Site Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. Ends Oct. 12. (505) 989-1199.

* “80th Anniversary Exhibition: O’Keeffe’s New Mexico,” Museum of Fine Arts, 107 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. Ends Nov. 2. (505) 827-4468.