When Georgia O’Keeffe made the 60-mile trek from her home and studio in Abiquiú to Santa Fe for health reasons back in 1984, she fully expected to come back. Sadly, she passed away two years later, at the age of 98, without a single return trip. That means that, unlike many homes-turned-museums, her residence remains largely as it was the day she left it.
What has changed in the last four decades is that O’Keeffe is now largely synonymous with New Mexico, and every year, more than 12,000 people make the pilgrimage to that 5,000-square-foot hacienda and studio to study the traditional adobe architecture, stroll through her gorgeous gardens, and take in the midcentury-modern décor. To get an even better understanding of how O’Keeffe lived, Giustina Renzoni, curator of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, says it’s helpful to get a sense of how the artist’s work, travels, and love for the landscape influenced her design choices.
Many artists—especially if they’re female — have to suffer through a miserable life and die before their work gets any respect from the establishment. Georgia O’Keeffe was not one of happened almost 30 years after her death (incidentally, the sale remains the highest ever achieved for a painting by a female artist at auction), Renzoni notes that O’Keeffe’s reputation as a well-respected modernist dates all the way back to the 1940s. “Her pieces sold for a quite a lot of money during her lifetime through her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, so she was very well-known and independently wealthy,” she says.
