Georgia O’Keeffe had an unexpected train detour to thank for her first encounter with New Mexico. Little did she know, it was the land that would free her—both artistically and emotionally.
Several months after photographer-gallerist Alfred Stieglitz presented O’Keeffe’s first New York solo show, in April 1917, the 29-year-old painter embarked on a trip across the American West with her youngest sister, Claudia. While they’d planned to head straight from Texas to Colorado, their train detoured to Santa Fe. New Mexico’s vast, mercurial skies and incandescent light mesmerized the artist. “I’m out here in New Mexico—going somewhere—I’m not positive where—but it’s great,” she gushed in a letter to Stieglitz, dated August 15th. “Not like anything I ever saw before.”
“There is so much more space between the ground and sky out here it is tremendous,” she continued. “I want to stay.” By 1949, O’Keeffe had made the New Mexican high desert her permanent home, indelibly tattooing its landscape to her work, identity, and legacy.
O’Keeffe is just one of countless modern and contemporary artists who’ve been drawn out of big-city art centers by New Mexico’s magnetic pull. They’ve been lured there by expansive vistas, quietude, and respite from social and market pressures. Other prominent New Mexico residents have included Marsden Hartley, Agnes Martin, Dennis Hopper, Ken Price, Larry Bell, Nancy Holt, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, Harmony Hammond, and Judy Chicago, among many others. Arts patrons, scholars, and writers—like Mabel Dodge Luhan, Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, and Lucy Lippard—have landed and stuck there, too. Long before them though, Native American artists started making art inspired by the transcendent, boundless landscape.
“New Mexico is a place where you—as a creative person, as an artist—can really work,” explained Lisa Le Feuvre, the director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, from her office in Santa Fe. “A lot of the buzz in your peripheral vision that you get in bigger cities disappears, so it makes your thoughts and ideas much more intentional.”
About a year ago, Le Feuvre relocated from London to Santa Fe to run the Holt/Smithson Foundation, an organization set up to preserve the legacy of Holt and her husband Robert Smithson, both land artists. The couple, who married in 1963, lived itinerantly for most of their lives together, until Smithson died tragically in a 1973 plane crash. Holt moved to New Mexico in 1995 and stayed there until her death in 2014.
“From what I’ve learned, she felt it was a good place to live and to think,” Le Feuvre explained of Holt’s attraction to Galisteo, a small town with a population of around 250, which rises from a vast expanse of desert around 20 miles south of Santa Fe. “For Nancy Holt—like for Harmony Hammond, Bruce Nauman, and most artists [who relocate here]—New Mexico is a choice of somewhere to live and to work, rather than being a necessary place to live and to work.”
Space for women: Harmony Hammond, Nancy Holt, and Judy Chicago
Harmony Hammond, a leader of the feminist art movement, “didn’t come [to New Mexico] for a community of artists at all,” as she insisted in a 2008 conversation with Julia Bryan-Wilson. But that didn’t stop several of her friends from joining her in Galisteo. Lippard—a feminist theorist and curator—and Holt—a land artist—both followed Hammond’s lead and settled in the small town. “I started staying with Harmony when I was out here,” Lippard told the Santa Fe New Mexican last year, “and suddenly the land across the creek was open, and I never looked at anything else.”
For her part, Hammond connected her move to Galisteo to a longer lineage of female artists, like Martin and O’Keeffe, who settled in New Mexico before them. “There’s something about this big space that gives everybody room to be who they think they are. Historically that’s been true for women,” she told Bryan-Wilson. “If they didn’t fit into the social structures on the East Coast, and they didn’t have money to go to Europe, they went west. They could smoke cigarettes. They could wear pants. They could swear. They could do whatever. Many were bisexual or lesbian. The west—it’s outlaw territory. I’m just assuming that’s one reason I feel quite comfortable.” (Five decades of Hammond’s work is currently on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum through September 15th.)
Judy Chicago, another pioneering feminist artist, also described her attraction to New Mexico in terms of space—both physical and psychological. “The light, the quiet and the psychic space to pursue my own vision far from the pressures of the market-driven art world,” Chicago explained, drew her to Belen, a small town with a population of around 7,000, located 30 miles south of Albuquerque.
Chicago has lived in New Mexico full-time since 1985. In 1993, she and her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, bought a 7,000-square-foot derelict railroad hotel in Belen, transforming it into their home and studio space. More recently, it’s also become home to Chicago’s nonprofit art space, Flower, whose mission is to “counter the erasure of women’s achievement through art,” the artist explained.
Hammond and Chicago join a long line of artists who equate the state’s wide-open spaces and the remove from the pressures of urban art centers with freedom—to experiment, to be themselves, and to veer boldly away from trends or norms.
It’s no surprise that many of them installed massive windows in their homes and studios, so they could perceive the landscape’s expansiveness—and the sense of freedom it offered—even indoors. Price’s and Nauman’s homes both contain windows with sprawling desert views. Holt’s did, too. “Through [her windows] you can literally perceive time,” Le Feuvre explained. “You can see the light changing, you can see the conditions of the earth changing. And when you watch the light, something amazing happens: you become aware of your own physical presence—not just on the Earth, but in the universe.”
She continued: “And that’s something that is fundamental to Nancy Holt’s work: This sense of how we, as human beings, find our place in the universe.”
O’Keeffe also transformed a wall of her Abiquiu studio into a long picture window, creating a panorama of the Chama river valley and her beloved Pedernal mountain beyond. The landscape became the subject of over 20 of her paintings.
“I wish you could see what I see out the window,” O’Keeffe wrote to Arthur Dove in 1942. “The earth pink and yellow cliffs to the north…pink and purple hills in front and the scrubby fine dull green cedars—and a feeling of much space.” She continued, summarizing New Mexico’s impact with pure, unadulterated awe: “It is a very beautiful world.”
