New horizons: The O'Keeffe Museum at 25

Jul. 15—details

—25th Anniversary Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Block Party

11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday, July 17

123 and 135 Grant Ave.

Block party free and open to the public; free museum admission for New Mexico residents Friday, July 15, through Monday, July 18

—Selections from the Collection

Through Dec. 31

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, 217 Johnson St.

Admission is $18, with discounts available; 505-946-1000, okeeffemuseum.org. Get timed tickets at okeeffemuseum.org/tickets-tours

One year after the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's grand opening in the summer of 1997, its namesake artist's home and studio in Abiquiú was named a National Park Service National Historic Landmark. Now a part of the museum's growing footprint, the home and studio continues to welcome visitors, preserved for posterity, like a work in a museum collection.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe maintains O'Keeffe's legacy in New Mexico and abroad, offering visitors an illuminating look at her creative process and opportunities to view its unparalleled collection of O'Keeffe works that range from 1901 to 1984. An artist of international standing, O'Keeffe became a feminist icon for her uncompromising commitment to shaping the trajectory of her career.

The museum celebrates its 25th anniversary this summer. The institution now holds 7,000 objects connected to the artist (1887-1986), including sculptures, paintings, drawings, sketches, photographs, textiles, and O'Keeffe's art materials. Also under its stewardship: a visitor welcome center in Abiquiú, a research center in Santa Fe, and an annex (the future site of a museum expansion), and other properties.

There was a time when a major O'Keeffe Museum milestone, such as its 10-year anniversary in 2007, was an exclusive formal event. But its current leadership decided to change the tone for the 25th. Expect something a lot more inclusive and community oriented: a block party.

The event takes place at 11 a.m. on Sunday, July 17.

"It's going to be a full day," museum Director Cody Hartley says.

Livestream performances by synth pop trio Lindy Vision, the funk band The Sticky, the 7-piece Latin ensemble Baracutanga, and New Mexico string band Lone Piñon will be accompanied by a digitally projected backdrop of images inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe's art and life and crowd-sourced through social media. Food and art-making activities will be available as well.

For some local attendees, the best part may be the free admission. New Mexico residents also get in free from Friday, July 15, through Monday, July 18.

The current exhibit lineup includes the multi-gallery Selections from the Collection (through December), a core exhibition of themed displays that cover the trajectory of O'Keeffe's artistic career.

"Currently, the way the galleries are presented, we really focus on different moments in O'Keeffe's life and the different places that were significant to her," says Hartley, who became director in 2019 after serving for six years as the museum's director of curatorial affairs. "We start with what is truly the most creative aspect of her creativity, which is her embrace of abstraction."

The focus on abstraction as a lead-in to an O'Keeffe retrospective may seem unusual, especially for an artist famous for her images of orchids, desert primroses, and the mesas around her home. Those are there too, but abstraction was a fundamental and enduring part of O'Keeffe's art, whether it was a landscape, a still-life, or a non-objective composition. This first section of the exhibit also reflects the ways in which place (notably New Mexico and Lake George, New York) affected her artistic vision.

"She was raised on a farm outside of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin," Hartley says. "She's always close to the land, so close observation is always part of how she works and sees her world. You see a number of works with various degrees of abstraction and incorporation of the natural world."

From the establishing gallery, visitors move into a selection of early works by O'Keeffe, including an accomplished watercolor of a vase of cherry blossoms that she made when she was in high school.

"It's loose and fluid and kind of contemporary but still traditional in its composition," Hartley says of the early watercolor. "She's using tricks of Renaissance perspective to suggest a surface with depth, to suggest a rounded vase with light passing through it. In later works, she doesn't care about those rules anymore, and it's about expression of the color, shape, and line, and all those elements."

The goal of the section is to establish how O'Keeffe found her artistic voice.

Selections from the Collection recently received a makeover.

"We just reinstalled the collections with works that have come back from a tour in Europe," Hartley says. "So we've got a refreshed presentation."

The traveling exhibition, Georgia O'Keeffe, opened at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid in April 2021 before moving on the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. It was the first time that a retrospective of the artist's work was presented in these cities.

Returning works include the museum's recent acquisition Ritz Tower (1928), which is a seminal depiction of an iconic New York City landmark and a rare example of an O'Keeffe urban nocturne. (Read more about Ritz Tower at sfnm.co/ritz-tower.)

Visitors will also see a revealing presentation on the recent conservation efforts behind her oil painting Spring (1948), as well as the painting itself. Spring is significant in that it's the artist's first large-scale (4 by 7 feet) painting created in New Mexico and was painted at a crossroads in her life. Her husband, famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz, died two years before, and O'Keeffe was transitioning from big city to life in rural New Mexico, the place with which she'd be associated for the rest of her life. (Read more about Spring at sfnm.co/spring and sfnm.co/conservation.)

The weekend's events reflect Hartley's commitment to maintaining the O'Keeffe museum as a place for community engagement.

"It's a day of music, art, and good company," he says. "Symbolically, that's a shift. I want us, as an organization, to make the museum accessible, meaningful, and relevant to the lives of our neighbors."

Part and parcel to that objective is the forthcoming expansion, which is scheduled to break ground in early 2023. Hartley intends to call a section of the new space "The Beyond" in honor of a 1972 painting of the same name by O'Keeffe. The painting features a black landscape separated from the firmament by a horizon line and a thin, cloud-like strip of white that runs across the canvas horizontally. Coming near the end of her life, the painting could be about what's next or what lies beyond the horizon. That notion of place is the core of what The Beyond will offer when it opens to the public in few years: the artist's New Mexico experience.

"It's not chronological," Hartley says. "It's an acknowledgment that where we are matters. This organization, this collection, needs to be cognizant of the place where we sit. The Beyond was one of her last unassisted paintings. She was already beginning to lose her eyesight at this point. She had macular degeneration. But it's an intriguing title for an artist who was constantly pushing herself, going beyond what she's done and experienced. It's kind of an invitation for visitors to continue the invitation beyond her own lifetime."