New exhibition at Georgia O’Keeffe Museum foregrounds contemporary Indigenous perspectives

On Aug. 26, 2020, three months after the start of the George Floyd protests, the award-winning journalist and arts writer Alicia Inez Guzmán hosted an online panel discussion, titled “This is Not O’Keeffe Country,” which aimed to reassess Georgia O’Keeffe’s legacy in New Mexico from local Indigenous perspectives. At a time when museums across the country were issuing “diversity, equity and inclusion” statements and land acknowledgments in the wake of what many pundits were then calling “America’s racial reckoning,” Guzmán’s panel prompted the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to reconsider its own institutional blind spots when it came to Indigenous histories.

In 2022, the museum hired Bess Murphy to be their curator of art and social practice — a newly created position — and she teamed up with an artist from Guzmán’s panel, Jason Garcia (Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo) to curate an exhibition that would place contemporary Tewa artists in conversation with the art and artifacts of Georgia O’Keeffe. They worked together for over two years, commissioning new works by artists, scholars and culture-bearers from the six Tewa Pueblos of northern New Mexico. The result, “Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country,” opens at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum on Friday, Nov. 7.

While the museum has highlighted Indigenous artists in the past, and one of the “Tewa Nangeh” artists, Michael Namingha (Ohkay Owingeh/Hopi), even had a solo show there in 2017, “Tewa Nangeh” represents the first large group exhibition “drawing awareness to the erasure of the Tewa presence in Georgia O’Keeffe’s artworks and her understanding of Northern New Mexico,” according to a joint curatorial statement.

“We didn’t need to do another exhibition about Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico,” Murphy said. “What we hadn’t ever done was an exhibition about New Mexico beyond Georgia, so this is our first step into that.”

The exhibition also signals the museum’s increased engagement with contemporary art.

“This is the first time that the O’Keeffe Museum has done a large-scale contemporary art exhibition, where the focus of the exhibition is on the contemporary artists, regardless of where they’re from,” Murphy said.

From the time O’Keeffe settled in Abiquiú in 1949 until her death in 1986, the artist remained disengaged from the communities who had lived in that area since time immemorial.

“She was not particularly interested in engaging with Indigenous communities during her lifetime,” Murphy said.

O’Keeffe was an outlier in this regard, Murphy said, compared to many other white artists of her generation who did engage with and support Indigenous communities in New Mexico. O’Keeffe’s own assistant and confidante, Maria Chabot, was a vocal advocate for Native American arts and helped establish the Santa Fe Indian Market.

O’Keeffe, meanwhile, made a series of controversial statements, which some scholars have interpreted as evidence of a settler colonial mentality. The most notorious of these is what she said about the mountain that she could see from her Ghost Ranch home, known to the Tewa people as Tsí Pín and which the Spanish called Cerro Pedernal.

“It is my private mountain,” O’Keeffe said. “God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.”

O’Keeffe painted the mountain at least 29 times in her lifetime, and after she died, her ashes were scattered over its peak.

Garcia, who is not just a co-curator of the exhibition but one of its participating artists, plans to exhibit his own paintings of the mountain, adding more to the gallery as he completes them over the course of the show’s run.

“My goal is to paint it 30-plus times. So, it’s like reclaiming the mountain,” Garcia said. “I’ll try and bring in at least one or two every week and put them on the wall, salon style.”

Garcia and Murphy acknowledged that there was some initial reluctance to the project, both from within the museum and from some of the Indigenous artists and scholars.

“The museum itself, really under the direction of Cody (Hartley), is at a moment where it has realized that it is critical for the O’Keeffe to reckon more deeply with how it hasn’t always been a trusted institution in New Mexico, that it hasn’t always served local artists and neighboring communities,” Murphy said. “So, I think, from the museum side, there was enthusiasm but maybe some apprehension, too.”

Some of the Tewa artists and scholars involved in the exhibition had questions, as well, Garcia said. He had to assure them that they could bring their authentic perspectives to bear, even if highly critical, without fear of censorship.

One participating scholar, Joseph Woody Aguilar, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a critical response to O’Keeffe’s 1943 “Head with Broken Pot,” which will hang beside the painting.

It reads, in part: “Posing human remains with an ancestral pot in such a way is in stark contrast to the reverence given by the Tewa to their ancestors and material remains and should stand as a reminder for Tewa People to protect our cultural heritage and patrimony.”

O’Keeffe’s collecting of bones, including animal bones, occurred within a very specific and often unacknowledged historical context, according to Murphy.

“She was able to collect enough bones on her walks that she filled up a whole barrel and shipped them back to New York to paint,” Murphy said. “It would take me ages to gather that many bones at this point, because they’re just not that common anymore.”

So, where did all the bones come from?

“In the 1920s and 30s, the government instituted laws across the Southwest, saying people’s livestock were doing damage and were too large, so they enforced this culling," Murphy said. “In a way, it was a racist move, a way to reclaim land … from the local Nuevo Mexicano ranchers.”

Murphy hopes that her curatorial work at the museum will help visitors better understand O’Keeffe within these larger historical narratives.

“Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country” is a polyvocal exhibition, and each of the 12 participants offers a singular perspective, ranging from the critical to the humorous.

“‘Tewa Nangeh’ is not about condemning O’Keeffe,” Garcia said. “Rather, it’s a deep engagement with O’Keeffe’s vision of the land that is also the setting for memories and experiences of Tewa people.”

“Tewa Nangeh” includes contributions from Joseph Woody Aguilar (San Ildefonso Pueblo), Samuel Villareal Catanach (Pojoaque Pueblo), Jason Garcia/Okuu Pín (Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo), John Garcia Sr. (Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo), Charine Pilar Gonzales (San Ildefonso Pueblo), Marita Swazo Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo), Matthew Martinez (Ohkay Owingeh), Arlo Namingha (Ohkay Owingeh/Hopi), Michael Namingha (Ohkay Owingeh/Hopi), Eliza Naranjo Morse (Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo), Martha Romero (Nambé Pueblo) and Randolph Silva (Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo).

New exhibition at Georgia O’Keeffe Museum foregrounds contemporary Indigenous perspectives

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