May, 2005
Museum Leaves Visitors 'Wowed'
By Judy Giannettino
For ABQjournal
SANTA FE - Georgia O'Keeffe made northern New Mexico her home for nearly four decades. Now, Santa Fe is home to the world's largest permanent collection of her artwork.
In a building that emphasizes shape, just as O'Keeffe did, more than 100 pieces of the late artist's work are displayed in nine galleries.
And even O'Keeffe admirers are likely to be surprised by the range of work that can be seen.
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
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Location: 217 Johnson Street; 505-946-1000
Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily (open to 8 p.m. on Fridays). Closed New Year's Day, Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas -- hours change for winter; call ahead.
Cost: $8 general admission; $4 New Mexico residents; $7 seniors; free from 5 to 8 p.m. on Fridays and free to youths.
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Most people are familiar with O'Keeffe's colorful paintings of large flowers or her depiction of bleached bones, but the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum shows that she did so much more.
"Everyone leaves just wowed," said Katy Hunting, communications director for the museum. "Everybody gets a sense of O'Keeffe with its breadth of her work."
Upon entering the stucco building that blends perfectly into downtown Santa Fe, visitors see a quote from O'Keeffe, who first visited New Mexico in 1917 and moved here in 1949. Part of the quote says, "Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words."
The rest of the tour of the museum is a journey through the statements O'Keeffe made through the unique colors and shapes that she painted, drew or sculpted between 1916 and 1980.
Some of the works O'Keeffe kept during her lifetime and seldom were exhibited before.
One of the first paintings encountered is "Black Cross with Red Sky," an oil on canvas done by O'Keeffe in 1929. The red sky is familiar to anyone who has spent any time in New Mexico.
Hunting said O'Keeffe didn't paint the people of New Mexico but painted their "spiritual symbols."
In one gallery are drawings and paintings of kachinas, including one framed in the rim of a headlight from one of O'Keeffe's old cars.
Another gallery is devoted to works on paper.
The final gallery is called the chapel gallery, Hunting said. Among the works there are two beautiful oils of cottonwood trees outside O'Keeffe's adobe home in Abiquiu - one of the trees during springtime; the other of the trees during winter. If you weren't already in New Mexico, you would long for it when viewing these.
The museum is designed so that after people have gone through it, they must turn around and go back through to get to the entrance/exit. Hunting said that allows them to see something they might have missed before and "to experience it all again."
Nothing distracts from O'Keeffe's work in the building, the floors of which were poured and worked on to resemble the floors of the artist's Abiquiu house, Hunting said.
A room off the galleries offers visitors a video biography of O'Keeffe, who died in Santa Fe in 1986 at age 98. She painted more than 2,000 pieces during her life, Hunting said.
The museum opened in July and already has exceeded expectations of how many people would visit it during its first year. So far, Hunting said, there have been 180,000 visitors
Many locals, she said, go through again and again.
That's probably a good idea because some of the artwork on display is on loan to the museum and will be replaced with other such work at some time.
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