Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

A new campus in the city

A major capital project with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe will create a new campus of art, focused on the life, work and complex identity of this pioneering modernist artist.

The new campus will allow visitors to connect more deeply with the artist, with her process, her writings and the powerful inspiration she drew from the landscapes of New Mexico and elsewhere in the American West.

“the wideness & wonder of the world…”

Before settling in New Mexico, O’Keeffe had journeyed many times there. She was enchanted by the skies, the vastness of the arid high desert, and the complex cultural nexus of Spanish, Native American and ‘Anglo’ peoples.

Our story-focused approach gives voice to multiple ways of seeing this complex modernist figure, including exploring issues of white privilege and colonialism.

Pioneering eye

At her home and studio at Abiquiu, north of Santa Fe, O’Keeffe combined her love of the New Mexican aesthetic — soft adobe walls, deep but small recessed openings, a modulation of light and shadow — with her pioneering eye as a modernist.

Although not a ‘plein-air’ painter, O’Keeffe spent much of her time in the great outdoors, going for long hikes even well into her old age.

An acute sense of place

O’Keeffe had an acute sense of place and in her art sought to express feelings and experiences within different landscapes.

Her gardens in New Mexico were a powerful expression of the regional habitat and plants.

Today, these horticultural spaces, tamed landscapes within the wider untamed expanses beyond the house, continue to define the visitor experience. Here at the centre of the home and studio in Abiquiu, O’Keeffe’s courtyard is both an important architectural gesture and a place from which many other portals beckon.

Prototype & process

Prototyping new ideas that go beyond the conventional art museum experience is central to our design methodology.

Here the well-known element of the New Mexican ‘banco’ provides seating area and a space to read and reflect, or simply to contemplate the rattle snake embedded in the glazed void…

Incorporating sensual and haptic elements

An important element of our exhibit design is to incorporate sensual and haptic elements from O’Keeffe’s work and life to bring the process of art-making to the fore.

The museum campus will invite visitors to actively explore the processes by which she created her oils, pastels, watercolours and even her ceramics and sculpture.