Georgia O’Keeffe: The Desert That Was Never Hers (#449)

When Georgia O’Keeffe arrived in New Mexico in 1929, she described it as love at first sight.

O’Keefe said:

When I got to New Mexico, that was mine.

As soon as I saw it, that was my country.

Her words would later echo through decades of tourism campaigns and art history textbooks, shaping the mythology of O’Keeffe Country.

A place imagined as vast, empty, and waiting to be claimed.

But from an Indigenous perspective, the land O’Keeffe called mine was never hers to take.

It already had a name. Tsip’in, the Tewa name for Cerro Pedernal.

And it already had a people, the Puebloan communities who have lived, prayed, and created in this region since time immemorial.

The Land Remembers

O’Keeffe’s New Mexico was not a blank canvas, though she painted it that way. The hills, the bones, and the sky, belonged to a living continuum of stories and ceremonies.

For Puebloan and Hispano peoples, these landscapes hold memories of ancestors, of migration, of dispossession. They are not empty, and they never were.

In claiming this land through her art, O’Keeffe participated, perhaps unknowingly, in a familiar colonial act: transforming Indigenous land into personal myth.

Her repeated assertion of mine echoes the language of manifest destiny, the same justification that allowed settlers to seize territory under the guise of divine purpose.

The Myth of the Solitary Genius

The image of O’Keeffe as the lone woman artist striding through the desert, unbound by convention, has become part of American legend. It is a story that fits neatly within a national narrative of individualism and frontier conquest. But like all myths, it conceals as much as it reveals.

Behind her self-sufficiency were the people of Avéshu (Abiquiú) who maintained her home, tended her gardens, and ensured she could paint in peace. Their labor, their patience, and their tolerance made her solitude possible. Yet they remain unnamed in most tellings.

This erasure mirrors a broader pattern. The empty landscapes O’Keeffe immortalized were inhabited - by Tewa, Tiwa, and Diné families whose presence was rendered invisible to serve the romantic ideal of the untouched Southwest.

The same vision of vacancy justified the creation of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where sacred lands were seized and poisoned in the name of scientific progress.

Querencia and the Meaning of Home

In New Mexico, there is a word that carries deep emotional weight: querencia. The place from which one’s strength draws, the home ground of identity.

For Indigenous and Hispano communities, querencia is not ownership; it is belonging born of relationship and responsibility.

O’Keeffe, in contrast, spoke of possession. Her paintings bore titles like My Red Hills, My Front Yard, and My Back Yard. This possessive language, while perhaps unintentional, reveals a spiritual and cultural divide:

Where Indigenous understanding sees stewardship,

O’Keeffe saw dominion.

A Complicated Admiration

It would be too easy, and too unfair, to dismiss O’Keeffe entirely. She was a woman of extraordinary courage and artistic conviction, rebelling against the constraints of gender and convention.

Her pursuit of independence and creative authenticity continues to inspire women artists, including Indigenous ones, who recognize in her defiance a mirror of their own.

Yet admiration does not erase discomfort. It is possible to honor her artistry while naming the harm of erasure.

O’Keeffe’s story, when viewed through an Indigenous lens, becomes both a testament and a cautionary tale. A reminder of how beauty and privilege can coexist uneasily in the same frame.

Reclaiming the Narrative

Today, many Indigenous and Chicano scholars, including Patricia Marroquin Norby, the first curator of Native American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are calling for a more situated understanding of O’Keeffe’s work.

Norby argues that O’Keefe’s art:

Aesthetically naturalized attitudes of Eurocentric entitlement

and acts of colonial violence

within the ancient Pueblo of Abiquiú.

Even the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has acknowledged this tension.

In 2021, it publicly rejected the phrase O’Keeffe Country, calling it the language of possession, colonization, and erasure.

This is not about vilifying O’Keeffe, but about truth-telling. It’s about making visible the people and histories that her brush once made invisible.

Holding Two Truths

To be Indigenous in O’Keeffe’s New Mexico is to live in the space between reverence and resistance.

One can feel awe at her mastery of light and color, and also anger at her disregard for the living world she depicted as hers. These feelings coexist. Messy, unresolved, and human.

In the end, perhaps the most honest way to see O’Keeffe is not as a thief of land or a heroine of art, but as a flawed woman seeking belonging in a place that was never empty.

Her ashes rest on Tsip’in, the mountain she called her own.

But the mountain remains what it always was: Tewa land, sacred and enduring.

O’Keeffe painted it over and over, believing that if she rendered it faithfully enough, she might claim it. The irony is that the land does not need to be claimed. It simply is. It holds its stories, and it remembers who has walked upon it.

Rick’s Commentary

Perspective, in art and in life, shapes what we see and what we fail to see.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s work is often praised for its bold perspective. Her ability to reduce a mountain to pure form, to turn a flower into a landscape, to transform the familiar into the abstract. Her genius lies in how she saw and in how she taught the world to see beauty differently.

Yet perspective is also a matter of position.

O’Keeffe’s vantage point was that of a visitor, an artist arriving from elsewhere, interpreting the land through her own lens of modernism and self-discovery.

For those of whose ancestors lived for centuries on this same land, the perspective is altogether different. They see not an empty desert waiting to be painted, but a living landscape layered with memory, ceremony, and belonging.

When O’Keeffe said, That was mine, she was speaking metaphorically, claiming spiritual kinship with a place that inspired her art.

But to Indigenous peoples, such language carries the weight of history, and of centuries of dispossession, erasure, and romanticization.

The same landscape that freed her imagination was the ground from which indigenous stories, homes, and ancestors were taken.

Perspective, then, is not neutral.

Perspective reveals both what the eye chooses and what it omits.

O’Keeffe’s paintings of New Mexico, celebrated for their clarity and openness, also conceal the complexity of the lives that inhabit that space.

For many Indigenous people, this is not simply an aesthetic difference. It is a reminder of how art can unintentionally perpetuate the silence of those who were already rendered invisible.

Still, to recognize this is not to deny O’Keeffe’s brilliance.

Rather, it is to broaden the frame. To hold multiple truths at once.

The desert she painted is both a site of artistic awakening and ancestral endurance.

O’Keeffe’s colors and forms can coexist with indigenous stories and grief.

Perspective, in this way, becomes not a boundary but a dialogue.

Between admiration and accountability.

Between seeing and remembering.

Between what is painted and what has always been there.

#bunyipsbooksbeyond