New $75M Georgia O’Keeffe Museum underway in Santa Fe

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe broke ground this summer on a new $75 million campus to showcase the life and work of one of New Mexico’s most influential late artists.

The 54,000-square-foot facility underway at 123 Grant Ave. will include an above- and below-ground level, roughly doubling exhibit space for the museum, which draws tens of thousands of visitors each year from across the globe.

The campus will also include new classrooms, a lecture hall and conservation labs, all housed in a building featuring locally sourced adobe and details inspired by O’Keeffe’s art, according to Museum Director Cody Hartley, who said the project’s architect, general contractor and subcontractors are all based in the state.

“Our program, our visitation, our collections, have outgrown the limited space we have,” Hartley told the Journal. “The new facility will allow us to continue welcoming our visitors from around the state and around the world with a much larger footprint.”

Excavation work for the museum’s lower level was completed last month, the first phase in an anticipated three years of construction; Hartley said a grand opening is slated for sometime in late spring or early summer of 2028. The project is expected to increase visitor capacity to 215,000 annually.

“We’re consolidating all of our operations on one block with a campus that’ll be beautifully landscaped to connect our buildings with pathways and beautiful plantings, and really that’ll be the front door for the museum,” Hartley said. “We’re hoping our visitors have the opportunity to really kind of ground themselves in the natural world before they enter into the galleries. Then the galleries themselves will allow us to tell the story of Georgia O’Keeffe’s art life and independent spirit in a series of spaces that will walk through her history.”

Born in a farmhouse near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on Nov. 15, 1887, O’Keeffe knew she wanted to be an artist from an early age. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, where she learned traditional painting techniques, according to the museum’s website.

O’Keeffe was heavily influenced by Arthur Wesley Dow, an American painter, printmaker and photographer, whose work inspired a young O’Keeffe to develop the singular watercolor style she later honed after moving to the Southwest part-time beginning in the late 1920s.

“Really, her connection with New Mexico starts in Taos,” Hartley said. “Her first extended visit to New Mexico was in the summer of 1929, when she stayed with Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, and that’s really where she began to fall in love with New Mexico.”

Three years after the death of her husband, photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz in 1946, O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico full-time, where she lived at her home and studio at Ghost Ranch, near Abiquiú, whose blushing desert views served as inspiration for many of her most famous Southwestern landscapes.

O’Keeffe spent the final years of her life in Santa Fe, where she died on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98.

Hartley, an art historian by training, became the museum’s director of curatorial affairs in 2013 before being made director in 2019. Though his career has taken him to many other places prior to the Southwest — from his home state of Wyoming to California to Massachusetts — he says O’Keeffe’s work has been a throughline throughout his life.

“I grew up in a house filled with Georgia O’Keeffe reproductions,” he said. “My mother’s an artist, and her favorite artist is Georgia O’Keeffe, so her work has always been on my mind and part of my studies.

“O’Keeffe was radically innovative,” he added. “She was doing things that nobody else was doing, really embracing abstraction as a way of expressing herself. But she was also doing it in a way that was really accessible. Her work is beautiful. It’s very engaging and welcoming.”

Approximately 91% of the funding for the project, one of the largest of its kind in New Mexico history, came from 98 individual donors, according to Museum Public Relations Manager Renee Lucero.

The new site will effectively replace the museum’s current location at 217 Johnston St., where the private nonprofit has housed the largest single collection of the painter’s work since first opening in 1997, 11 years after O’Keeffe’s death.

The museum also manages O’Keeffe’s historic Home and Studio and the O’Keeffe Welcome Center in Abiquiú, as well as the artist’s nearby Ghost Ranch property.

For more information, visit okeeffemuseum.org/.