SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Forty years ago today, the modernist artist Georgia O’Keeffe died in her adopted home of New Mexico. Ever since, the starkly beautiful, high desert where she lived and painted has come to be called O’Keeffe Country. Two shifts are underway today – one cultural, one legal. There is a move afoot prompted by Pueblo Indians and Hispanos who’ve lived on the land for centuries to stop calling it O’Keeffe Country. There’s also a historic new conservation plan that aims to permanently protect that landscape with its colorful cliffs and buttes. John Burnett has our story.
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JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: On a breezy afternoon, fluffy clouds drift past the sun, throwing light, then shadow across distant cliffs layered in yellow ochre and sienna. The CEO of Ghost Ranch, David Evans, and I are on mountain bikes to see the country.
What was it about this place that O’Keeffe loved to paint?
DAVID EVANS: Georgia O’Keeffe loved it because the same reasons that everyone who visited loves it. It’s the richness of the colors of the cliffs against the sky and the way the light plays upon it, the way the clouds move in. It’s incredible.
BURNETT: Ghost Ranch is a spiritual and educational retreat center located just over an hour’s drive northwest of Santa Fe. It was donated in 1955 to the Presbyterian Church Foundation, its current owner. The ranch is best known as the home and inspiration of Georgia O’Keeffe. She’s a towering figure in northern New Mexico and in 20th century American art. Regarded as the mother of American modernism, her abstract, color-drenched paintings of flowers, bones and desert land forms brought her international acclaim. She purchased an adobe home on Ghost Ranch in 1940 when it was still a dude ranch. She spent most of the rest of her life out here painting the raw beauty of her surroundings.
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GEORGIA O’KEEFFE: It’s something that’s in the air. It’s just different. The sky is different. The stars are different. The wind is different.
BURNETT: She gave this rare interview in the mid-’70s for a film broadcast on WNET public television. At 88, the legendary artist, dressed in a black smock, is seen walking through these badlands, her face furrowed by age, her eyes still blazing.
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O’KEEFFE: As soon as I saw it, that was my country.
BURNETT: My country – that played well among her legions of admirers, but not so much in these parts, especially among the Tewa, the Indigenous people that include the Pueblo Indians. Her favorite subject was Pedernal, the flat-topped mountain that stands like a sentinel over the space, and she painted it 29 times and had her ashes scattered on the summit. I brought that up with Jason Garcia, a Tewa artist who has also painted Pedernal, a sacred landmark, whose native name is Tsip’in – flaking stone mountain.
Georgia O’Keeffe was quoted as saying, “It’s my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.” What’s your reaction to that, Jason?
JASON GARCIA: (Laughter) It’s pretty funny to hear that, to think that one person can say, if I paint this enough, I can have it, God told me. But it’s just not just hers. You have Tewa people that have lived here on the landscape as well since time immemorial.
BURNETT: Garcia is cocurator of a groundbreaking exhibition at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. Twelve Tewa artists respond with their art to O’Keeffe’s aesthetic claim to their ancestral land. The museum poster designed for this exhibition says, welcome to O’Keeffe Country. But Tewa has been scrawled across her name.
Her legacy remains a huge draw for Ghost Ranch. The annual music festival is called Blossoms & Bones after her still-lifes, and the ranch’s logo is a classic O’Keeffe drawing of a cow skull. Like the museum, though, Ranch CEO David Evans says they’ve begun to reframe the place name.
EVANS: O’Keeffe Country is not a framing that we use. This country has a very rich history, and she’s an important part of it, but it’s not solely her story by any means.
BURNETT: Even though she said, this is my country.
EVANS: She said that, but I think most people don’t see it that way at all today.
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BURNETT: Least of all Norman Vigil. He runs 25 cattle on Ghost Ranch pastureland.
NORMAN VIGIL: Hey, vaca (ph)
BURNETT: He shakes a bucket of food pellets and calls his fat, black mama cows.
VIGIL: Hey, vaca (ph).
BURNETT: The O’Keeffe Country brand has been good for realtors, cafes, gift shops and Airbnbs, but Vigil says for most folks in the region, like him, all it’s done is drive up home prices.
VIGIL: You know, there’s a lot of people making a good living because of Georgia O’Keeffe, and so can you argue with the – on the economic side for those folks? But for us, it’s really – the exposure hasn’t been all that great.
BURNETT: What Vigil is grateful for is a new land deal that’s supposed to protect Ghost Ranch country in perpetuity. It will continue the long-standing arrangement that lets local cattlemen use ranch pastures for their winter grazing. In the first phase, the New Mexico Land Conservancy will pay the Church Foundation nearly a million dollars to never develop the land, permanently banning ranchettes and cellphone towers. The conservancy’s executive director is Jonathan Hayden.
JONATHAN HAYDEN: This is truly a once-in-a-generation opportunity to protect one of the West’s most iconic landscapes. Acreage wise, it’s not the largest, but in terms of its meaning to people going back to Indigenous cultures, to land grant heirs and everyone who is inspired by the work of Georgia O’Keeffe is truly a rare opportunity.
BURNETT: Again, Ranch CEO David Evans.
EVANS: Protecting this land and being a good steward of the land is one of the most important parts of Ghost Ranch’s mission.
BURNETT: He says it’s expensive to ensure a great guest experience and maintain 33 square miles of property.
EVANS: We have over a hundred buildings, 21,000 acres, and it’s a tough business model. The revenue will really help to support our operating costs and to keep this open for future generations.
BURNETT: For years, the nonprofit Ghost Ranch has charged film crews to use this pristine emptiness as a backdrop. Production companies out here have filmed everything from Chevy truck commercials to the movie “Oppenheimer.” Tewa artist Jason Garcia knows why they want to be out here.
GARCIA: Again, you know, (laughter) it’s funny when you think about the O’Keeffe quote of her, where she’s all like, there’s something different about New Mexico. Yeah, she’s very right. You know, she’s not lying. I’m always thinking of that as I drive on the landscape and look at the mountains, the clouds, dusk, dawn, midnight. It’s – I mean, it’s a beautiful place. I wouldn’t trade it for anywhere else.
BURNETT: Georgia O’Keeffe said it this way – perfectly mad-looking country, hills and cliffs and washes too crazy to imagine, all thrown up in the air by God and let tumble where they would.
I’m John Burnett for NPR News in northern New Mexico.
(SOUNDBITE OF AMERICA SONG, “A HORSE WITH NO NAME”) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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