Montclair Art Museum, September 28, 2012 — January 20, 2013
Denver Art Museum, February 8 — April 28, 2013
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, May 17, 2013 — September 8, 2013
Heard Museum, September 27, 2013 — January 12, 2014

Georgia O'Keeffe began spending part of the year living and working in New Mexico in 1929, a pattern she rarely altered until 1949, when she made Northern New Mexico her permanent home three years after the death of her husband, celebrated photographer Alfred Stieglitz. O'Keeffe was inspired to paint and draw many aspects of what she saw in New Mexico, and these images are among her most revered and well-known.

During her first summers in the area, O'Keeffe stayed in the home of her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan and her husband Tony Lujan, a member of the Taos Pueblo. They presented new experiences and ideas to O'Keeffe during her visit. Mable Dodge Luhan was convinced that the "Southwest may be the land of the new birth, of the synthetic American culture we have all desired." Tony Lujan escorted O'Keeffe to sacred Native lands. In the summer of 1929 O'Keeffe painted the landscape surrounding Luhan’s property, overlooking the Taos Pueblo, which she also painted. In addition, she traveled to see ceremonial dances at, among others, the Taos, Cochiti, and Santo Domingo Pueblos. O'Keeffe returned to Taos in 1930, where she continued to paint the landscape and attend dances at the pueblos along the Río Grande River.

While the New Mexico landscape became a prominent part of O'Keeffe’s life and art, very little has been known or written about O'Keeffe's involvement with Native American art and culture – it is popularly assumed that she had none. But from 1931 to 1945, O'Keeffe created sixteen drawings, watercolors, and paintings of Katsina dolls (carved and painted representations of Hopi spirit beings), but because O'Keeffe retained and never exhibited these paintings, they remain generally unknown to the public.

Interestingly, O'Keeffe’s fascination with the Katsina dolls and ceremonial dances at the pueblos coincided with a period of increasing interest among several artists in the Stieglitz avant-garde circle, who sought inspiration in New Mexico’s landscape and indigenous cultures for the realization of a specifically American art. These artists looked to the area’s unique cultures and geography as a source of imagery that would lend their work a particular American identity and thus reflect its distinctive heritage. Their goal was to create a specifically American modernist art that was independent of and separate from European modernism. However, their specifically American art pictured many generalized ideas about the indigenous people and places of the Southwest. For example, while the dances and Katsina dolls were accessible to outsiders, the culture of the Katsina was not. The artist’s painting entitled Paul’s Kachina relates the doll to her friend Paul Jones, who owned the doll, not its cultural source. Between 1931 and 1945, she continued to attend dances at the pueblos as she painted several more Katsina dolls. Interestingly, O'Keeffe never painted the Katsina dances, as many other artists did during those years.

From the Desert: Georgia O'Keeffe, the Katsina and the Land includes O'Keeffe’s Katsina doll paintings and approximately ten Katsina dolls similar to those that inspired her Katsinum paintings. At the time of her death in 1986, O'Keeffe owned two of the nine culturally specific Katsina dolls she depicted, and she either owned or borrowed the others that her paintings present. In juxtaposing these paintings with, as closely as possible, the Katsina dolls that interested O'Keeffe, the exhibition explores the meaning and significance of these objects to O'Keeffe. At the same time, the exhibition catalogue addresses the cultural complexity of this Hopi art form in the history of twentieth century modernism, from the specificity of its sacred source, to its position as an American icon.

The people and places of the American Southwest inspired a particular modern art in America. O'Keeffe made significant contributions by painting the iconic architecture and landscape of New Mexico, especially what she saw in Taos and near her house at Ghost Ranch. In presenting a selection these paintings along with the Katsina doll paintings for the first time, the exhibition focuses on the breadth of O'Keeffe’s interests in the environment that became her home.

Co-curators: Barbara Buhler Lynes, Curator, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and The Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center and Carolyn Kastner, Associate Curator, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

Catalogue: The exhibition catalogue, published by the University of New Mexico Press, reproduces all works in the exhibition and includes an introduction by Lynes that situates O'Keeffe's Katsina doll works within the larger context of her life and art. Alph Secakuku’s essay discusses the role of Katsina dolls in indigenous ceremonies and religion, and specifically the nine figures O'Keeffe depicted. An essay by Jackson Rushing, Professor of Art History at the University of Oklahoma examines O'Keeffe's Katsina paintings in relation to Indian-themed works by other avant-garde artists of the period. The catalogue also includes an interview with the Hopi artist, Dan Namingha, and an essay by Kastner that analyzes the cultural complexity of Katsina dolls in the twenty-first century.