The Black Place: Georgia O’Keeffe and Michael Namingha

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is proud to present an installation of the photographically based work of Michael Namingha in conversation with Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings and drawings of a western New Mexico landscape she called “The Black Place.”

In 2017, Museum staff introduced Namingha to the site where O’Keeffe created more than a dozen major works between 1936 and 1949. O’Keeffe returned many times to the location on painting expeditions that always required staying overnight, camping equipment, water and food, in addition to her art supplies. When Namingha made a day-trip to “The Black Place” for the first time, he carried only one tool, a drone camera. He returned to his studio with digital photographs and video recordings, a resource that he has developed into individual works of art on a computer, by dividing, moving, and pulling the images into abstract compositions. His work, like O’Keeffe’s, is refined and abstracted in an imaginative process that creates a wondrous and disorienting experience for viewers. Inspired by the same remote landscape, but created in different centuries, this installation offers a new opportunity to consider the changing New Mexico landscape and our evolving notions of art.

Michael Namingha is a multidisciplinary artist who received his B.B.A. from Parsons School of Design in New York City. His work is collected and shown internationally, most recently in Japan at the Tobinodai Historic Site Park Museum in Octopus Dreams, and at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden in Conception, Abstraction, Reduction: The Art of Dan, Arlo, and Michael Namingha.