A walk through a famous life

Mar. 3—details

Georgia O'Keeffe: Making a Life

10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Mondays, through March 27, 2024

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, 217 Johnson St.

Admission is $20, with discounts; 505-946-1000, okeeffemuseum.org

Georgia O'Keeffe's Ritz Tower depicts the 32-story building where the artist and husband Alfred Stieglitz, famed photographer and gallerist, lived in New York City. Next to it in the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum is Black Cross with Stars and Blue, which shows a dramatically different landscape, the landscape of New Mexico.

The first was painted in 1928, the second only a year later. Together, they highlight O'Keeffe's life-changing move to the Land of Enchantment, where she began living part time in 1929, as one of many actions she took as a "maker." That is, a person who carefully curated her life, style, and artistic practice, says Ariel Plotek, the museum's curator of fine art.

They're part of the museum's Georgia O'Keeffe: Making a Life, which runs through March 27, 2024. The story is told in a nonlinear fashion, with items created decades apart appearing close together. It includes two paintings, three pastels, one unfinished sketched canvas, one unfinished painted canvas, three sculptures, a ceramic piece, and photographs of O'Keeffe.

Plotek walked through both Making a Life and a sister exhibition, Radical Abstraction, on a recent Tuesday, when the museum is closed to the public. He explained the significance of various works and how, as curator, he sees connections between seemingly disparate items in the museum's collection.

"So, that's her first summer in New Mexico, at Taos," Plotek says of Black Cross with Stars and Blue. "We don't quite know if this is morning or evening, but I love the way that she's given us the stars and the sky."

He suspects O'Keeffe was drawn to crosses as objects, not as symbols.

"She does talk about what she describes as the veil of Catholicism that hangs over this part of the country," Plotek says. "But I don't think she's particularly drawn to [the cross] as a religious motif."

O'Keeffe painted Black Cross with Stars and Blue when New Mexico was brand new to her, taking in the state's beauty faster than she could put it to canvas. In the late 1920s, many of the homogenous businesses and transportation methods that have created similar-looking enclaves all over the country — think McDonald's, interstate highways, giant grocery stores — didn't yet exist. Partly as a result, Plotek says, New Mexico looked even more unlike New York City back then than it does now.

Although color photography was widespread toward the end of O'Keeffe's life — she died in 1986 — the majority of the photos showing her are in black and white. Personal effects in the exhibition such as her clothing are a reminder she lived in a world as colorful as the one she painted. Three dresses from the 1950s in brown and green hues dangle from hangers next to one another, offering the viewer an idea of O'Keeffe's physical size.

O'Keeffe's paintings offer a sense of her vision of the world. Her personal belongings offer perspective into her daily life — the practical dresses evoking the simplicity with which she lived in rural New Mexico; a set of brushes and pieces of charcoal providing a reminder of the tactile way she brought beauty into the world; and a case containing cookbooks, handwritten ingredient lists, and a coffee grinder providing evidence that she often was busy with her hands even when not painting.

The museum has about 140 paintings, as well as thousands of photographs that either feature O'Keeffe or were shot by the artist, Plotek says. Images of O'Keeffe throughout the exhibition serve as a timeline illustrating when she created various pieces of art.

"She is probably one of the most photographed women of the 20th century — I mean, alongside Marilyn Monroe," he says.

O'Keeffe dabbled in photography while traveling in Hawaii in 1939, borrowing a camera from a guide, Plotek says. Hawaii was not yet a state, and she traveled to the island on a passenger ship, as commercial air travel was still on the horizon. Plotek adds that she didn't explore photography much until well after the death of Stieglitz, who was 24 years her senior and died 40 years before she did, in 1946.

An advertising agency invited O'Keeffe to visit Hawaii to create two paintings for Hawaiian Pineapple Co. — now Dole plc. Other well-known artists of the time had been commissioned for similar work, and O'Keeffe divided her nine-week visit among four of the islands.

Exhibition viewers will hear classical music, the style O'Keeffe would play at her homes at Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú, Plotek says.

"She had the most high-tech, hi-fi equipment at the two houses, including speakers that she'd had built in that are basically like surround sound in her studios," Plotek says. "She didn't really spend money on a lot of things, but she'd have good appliances. And she'd have a nice, functional car. She really appreciated music, and now we actually always have music playing on the tours of the Abiquiú house."

A portion of the exhibition is dedicated to O'Keeffe's 1959 visit to Japan, featuring mementos such as a black dress purchased in Kyoto, fabrics, and receipts. Plotek includes a pastel painting of Japanese flower arranging that O'Keeffe created in 1921, an example of the exhibition's use of nonlinear storytelling.

She was so impressed that she returned to the country the following year, Plotek says. It was an interesting time for a Northern New Mexican to be in Japan, less than two decades after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

"She had been here in New Mexico at the time when tests were conducted at Trinity, and she had a bunker," Plotek says. "She was meeting people like [physicist J. Robert] Oppenheimer at Ghost Ranch because scientists from the lab would go there to take holidays. So she knew more than others about the work that was being done right out here."

O'Keeffe might have been urged to travel with a group for her safety, Plotek says.

"She's very inspired, not only by the view from airplane windows, but by what she sees in Japan, so she produces two views of Mount Fuji that are in our collection, and this is the larger of the two," he says, motioning to an untitled painting from 1960 dubbed Mt. Fuji, its sky many shades of pink. "This one actually underwent some conservation recently."

O'Keeffe destroyed some of her work for various reasons, Plotek says, such as conservation work she didn't like or changed sensibilities. Sometimes O'Keeffe would burn the works; sometimes she'd randomly paint over them. In the exhibition, the backs of these paintings are shown.

"She would sometimes trade with a collector to get a picture back and destroy it," Plotek says. "The time she spent after Alfred Stieglitz's death in 1946, I think, made her much more mindful of her own legacy. She kept very good records toward the end of her life of her work, and I think she didn't want anything that she considered subpar to be out there associated with her."