In 2016, I fried tortillas in oil for Margaret Wood, the former cook and caretaker of Georgia O’Keeffe, in service of preparing the artist’s recipe for enchiladas.

This was a centerpiece of the trip’s programming—a four-day Georgia O’Keeffe–themed “retreat” for artists and writers held at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico—which ranged from hiking to the sites of various paintings to, curiously, rolling a television cart into our rustic adobe lodgings to watch a DVD of the 2009 Lifetime original movie, starring Joan Allen as the titular artist. I had applied for and received the funding to travel and attend through my graduate school, still dumbfounded I had convinced them it was vital research to my master’s project.

The retreat was not exclusively offered to women, but that’s all who showed up. Nothing on the itinerary directly prompted emotional introspection, but it bled into and around each activity nonetheless. Aside from a few working artists—and a blankly smiling graduate student—most of the women seemed to be seeking a true emotional retreat from genuine midlife crises. And through clasped hands, shared tears, self-help books, and oracle cards, by god, they gave each other one.

I was 23, closeted even to myself, and, by the time Margaret Wood showed up, eager to do something with my hands other than jot down a bewildering, automatic log of the physical and emotional surroundings I was ill-equipped to make sense of. But I could fry tortillas. Admittedly, I had never actually fried them in oil before—we always just heated them dry on the stove and flipped them with our fingers at home (or, in my unsupervised hours, in the microwave with shredded cheese and hot sauce). So I stood, a little dubiously, over the pan of oil, holding the slotted spatula as Margaret watched out of the corner of her eye.

Subscribe now

I don’t remember much else about Georgia O’Keeffe’s enchiladas, I must say—my still somewhat childish palate found them a little underwhelming. Enchiladas, to me, were red-sauced and cheese-encrusted, baked in casserole dishes when my brother and I requested them for our birthdays, welcomed guest stars when they appeared in my mother’s weeknight rotation of easily reheatable dinners, left for my dad to serve us while she worked the evening shift at the hospital.

I have since eaten and enjoyed New Mexican–style enchiladas far more than the ones I helped prepare and ate that day. Looking at Margaret’s recipe for Georgia’s today—shredded “precooked” chicken, Monterey Jack or mild cheddar cheese, minced onion, and a green chile sauce made of fresh Hatch green chile peppers, more onion, chicken stock, garlic (a single clove for a pound of chiles), and flour or cornstarch—immortalized in her 1991 book, A Painter’s Kitchen, I notice that additional salt beyond what may be in the chicken stock is remiss.1

I also notice, frankly, very little difference between this recipe and many of my own grandmother’s, who cooked for a husband (if he was around) and two children between the 1940s and the 1970s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. If anything, one could argue Georgia’s enchiladas are more homemade, more “authentic”—like my mother’s child-centric application of enchiladas in her own kitchen, my grandmother’s priorities are legible in the shorthand of convenience. Monterey Jack or mild cheddar are frequently substituted for Mexican queso, and while she used ancho chiles in many of her recipes, her meatless kid-friendly enchiladas call simply for canned, store-bought sauce (but also for a side of homemade beans and sopa de arroz). Her recipe for chiles rellenos, even, was adapted nontraditionally for green bell peppers to meet the picky, growing eaters across the counter.

Like Georgia, my grandmother survived her husband and did not remarry. Born in 1926, Anita Serrano died just ten days shy of her seventy-third birthday in 1999. Georgia died the year she would have otherwise turned ninety-nine, in 1986.

And between 1984 and 1987, Anita painted.

It might have been the first painting I ever saw in person, and it hung on the wall behind us as we ate dinner. A bowl frozen perfectly on its side in the act of its spilling—pears, apples, a peach (possibly), plum, orange and grapefruit, banana, and blue grapes, smooth and oblong like pebbles or black beans—transfigured into a halo around the fruit as around the heads of humble saints in Renaissance paintings, with an emerald jug in the background, propping up the scene. Where might one have seen such an image to reference in 1986, in Wisconsin where these fruits are not in season at the same time (or ever), and on a fixed income?

In a magazine? In the mind’s eye?

The hands that painted it—that neatly signed “A. Serrano” in the bottom corner, at sixty years old had already been pained by rheumatoid arthritis for more than two decades, had earned wages by typing and tediously hand-coloring sepia-toned photographs, had held her first grandchild, had held and fed children of her own.

The hands had toasted the rice for the sopa de arroz that we, too, sometimes ate beneath the painting and recorded the recipes by hand, sometimes typed them, often annotated them, and tucked them into a small patterned recipe binder. When Anita Serrano—the author, the painter—died, it lived between her daughter’s cookbooks.

Another painting, a pot of daisies and blue flowers, lived elsewhere in the house until I begged for it to be hung in my room. Then, many years later, we found a pad of previously unknown watercolors in the basement of a different house. But between these discoveries—the painting on the wall that predated my earliest memories and the watercolors unearthed only in the last ten or so years—I had ingested the tangible possibility of making art right along with the rice and beans.

The physical archive of Anita’s art spans only four years. The flowers, surely not the first thing she ever painted but the first that survives, were painted in 1984. The fruit bounty, in 1986. The watercolors—those that are dated—between 1987 and 1988. I do not know the daily texture of her life in those four years, but the rough outline is a woman in her own apartment, no longer able to work because of the arthritis, no longer married to a violent man, punctuated by the birth of her second grandchild. The question is how a vibrant, meticulous painting comes into being, fully formed, in 1984. Where are the sketches, the rough starts, the experiments? The answer, or part of the answer, is simply not extant, has perhaps been lost to ruthless self-censure or a bout of dispassionate decluttering.

Then there are the recipes. To merely stuff the gap prior to 1984 with a recipe book—Look, she was busy feeding her family!—is an incomplete caricature of an answer. But by 1984, her own children were grown, and she had more of what art requires: time. Sprinkled throughout the recipes are biographical details and influences, if scant, of years before and during painting—for example, the bell peppers for chiles rellenos. At one point she had to cook enough beef for buns to feed her future son-in-law’s bachelor party and, at another point, the funeral of her cousin’s young daughter. She clipped and saved a recipe for “Ablóndigas de Jalisco” in 1978 and saved entire pages from the “Mexican Cookery” sections of the 1964 Woman’s Day Collector’s Cookbook. (Anita was born in Kansas City, Missouri, but her parents had come there from Guadalajara in Jalisco.) She visited her mother, who had since moved to California and married an Italian man, and began heating garlic and crushed chili pepper flakes in olive oil for the recipes she brought back home. She kept three different recipes for “Pasta ‘fazule’” (pasta fazool or pasta e fagioli). A coworker at Delco Electronics in Milwaukee brought in a pistachio Jell-O mold with Cool Whip and fruit and she asked for the recipe. (She also kept a 1962 spiral-bound Joys of Jell-O “recipe” book that suggested fish-and-vegetable concoctions suspended in the fruit-flavored gelatin. My mother recalls eating broccoli in lemon Jell-O more than once.)

Her watercolor paintings provide the landscape of daydream and inspiration, of whatever appealed to her imagination, or to reference from a book or a wall calendar, something on television, or moving past the window of a car: flowers, birds, boats, lighthouses, and barns (Wisconsin pastorals). A faraway mountain road and a mailbox bearing her surname. A clever signature? A deeper desire?

I wrote most of those words when I endeavored to print a book of Anita’s recipes and paintings to give to my mother, my brother and sister-in-law, and myself for Christmas a couple years ago. These recipes and paintings form the complete original, written archive of the woman and the artist.

It makes sense that I have an interest in what my own grandma cooked and ate in addition to what she painted and why she may have painted it. It makes sense in the obvious, deeply personal way that tracing our own lineages interests us, an interest that seldom crosses wholly intact to another unrelated person unless the telling is bound together by another stronger, more universal connective tissue. But there are only two people for whom I own an original or copies of published archives of both art and recipes. One is a woman I am related to.

The other is Georgia O’Keeffe.

Why would I or anyone know or care what Georgia ate? Why do photographs of Georgia’s pantry continue to circulate digitally? This is a far murkier matter. Truthfully, I only purchased a cheap, battered copy of A Painter’s Kitchen when it occurred to me to write this essay; or, when the connective tissue of this telling came together. I sat down outside on a hot day to make myself get through the thing as quickly as possible. Granted, this recipe book reflects the artist’s diet in her nineties, so we can and should disregard the suggestion that a soup composed essentially of 2 cups of peas and 2 cups of broth serves 3–4(!) adult humans, even with the accompaniment of a “vegetable, bread or crackers, and a desert,” as Margaret noted.2 In a way, I had dreaded encountering this text because I already knew, from her letters and various accounts, more or less what to expect: a deceptively simple, light diet of fresh, more-or-less locally sourced foods.

Here’s what I mean by deceptively simple: Yes, she had two bountiful gardens, from which she ate a wide variety of vegetables and herbs. Under her direction, these were planted, managed, harvested, and preserved for her by a rotating household staff. But her main garden came with the acquisition of a property that had been built for and occupied by José Maria Chávez, a notorious military general from a prominent Spanish family who had killed and enslaved countless indigenous people under the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. occupations of Abiquiú. The house had a room without windows that locked from the outside, where Chávez imprisoned his captives overnight and where Georgia dried her herbs.3

Then there was the irrigation of the garden, which relied upon the village’s community-operated system: “The acequia, or ditch system, established centuries ago in New Mexico, provides spring water to the villagers on specified days and times of the week, according to their needs. [O’Keeffe’s] garden diverted water from the main ditch two or three times weekly and guided the water through small canals throughout the garden area and the fruit tree terraces.”4

Ah, simplicity! And what about what couldn’t be grown? Margaret recalled: “Every few weeks, one of Miss O’Keeffe’s staff would make the trip ‘to town’ for all needed supplies, including thick, high-quality T-bone steak, cubes of sirloin steak for stew, twice-ground round steak, chicken, and for special occasions, a leg of lamb.”5 And noted by Margaret’s apostrophes, “to town” could have meant one of the nearby villages, Abiquiú or Española, or even as far as Santa Fe, which was a day’s drive before today’s highways were built. “Do you think other people eat as well as we do?” Georgia asked Margaret one day.6 But she knew the answer—no!

Georgia was far from the off-grid, self-sufficient homesteader she might seem to us today. She was a wealthy, celebrity artist living in—and depending on—the patience, knowledge, and community of the village around her.

Georgia was incredibly health-conscious. She exercised daily—including walking every morning and before supper, calisthenics in front of full-length mirrors, and even practicing the since-debunked “Rolfing” method that claimed to improve biochemical functioning via movements aligned with the body’s energetic field.7 (She had befriended its founder, Ida Rolph, in New York.) The nutrition guidance of Adelle Davis—whose books included Let’s Get Well, Let’s Cook it Right, and Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit—guided her diet. Each morning, she drank a mixture of water and brewer’s yeast and ate a tablespoon of molasses, likely for additional vitamins and minerals. She also drank a daily mixture of lecithin and seaweed agar in water, likely to lower LDL cholesterol (lecithin) and act as an appetite suppressant (agar)! Other aspects of her lifestyle were notable, if less intentional; her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, had been a proud teetotaler (and, frankly, thank GOD) and didn’t smoke. Georgia smoked and drank a little on her travels to get away from Alfred during their marriage, but they weren’t habits that stuck.

And she lived to nearly a hundred. It’s easy to draw, even unconsciously, a causal relationship between her “good” habits and that longevity, even with myriad other incalculable factors at play (e.g., genetics, environment).8 Would there be multiple published volumes dedicated to what she ate if she had died at 54?

There was a certain hard-won crustiness (and crunchiness) to Georgia’s approach to bodily health—one that complicates our image of the active, independent, sun-weathered artist enjoying her golden years in New Mexico. She knew exactly what it felt like to have no energy to muster, to be confined to bed for days, weeks, or months at time. Throughout the first half of her life, she was frequently ill. “I was very sick when I was eighteen,” she recalled to Alfred of a particularly bad case of typhoid, which had even caused her hair to fall out, “and I have forgotten lots of things that happened a year or two before and after—I really lost about four years.”9 She caught measles a few years later; in the fall of 1917, she came down with a persistent flu, took an indefinite medical leave from her teaching job, and moved to New York to recuperate under Alfred’s care and the promise of a year to paint in the spring of 1918—catapulting Georgia directly into the prominent photographer and gallerist’s orbit (and arms).

In the months and years leading up to this moment, their epistolary relationship grew and deepened as Georgia kicked around abstract ideas of art and self in a dusty bible town, enjoying a rare and lonesome sense of freedom, which Alfred read in awe and amusement from New York. Reading these letters myself, I was struck and heartened by how much time Georgia reported spending in bed—recovering from briefer bouts of illness, yes, like tonsilitis, but also from the kinds of emotional exhaustion and overwhelm that send a person straight to bed the minute they return home: “I hope I’m the tiredest girl in the world—I’d hate to think anyone else is any more tired,” she wrote to Alfred in 1915.10

Throughout her nearly three decades in New York, she would frequently come down with something after the opening of a new exhibit, likely due to the stress and apprehension of how the critics would characterize her work. In 1927, when she was about forty, she was hospitalized for the removal of two cysts from her breasts—fortunately, they were benign. (When my grandmother was about forty, about forty years after Georgia’s surgery, she too went under for a biopsy of a lump in her breast, waking to the irrevocable results of a unilateral mastectomy and preventative hysterectomy.) And in 1933, she was also hospitalized for “psychoneurosis”11—an outmoded term for what might be better described today as a persistent anxiety disorder or severe, treat-resistant depression.

If Georgia lived a life built around good health and structure in New Mexico, it was almost certainly a measure of control in response to all that had been out of her control before. And this level of control—of ordering the hours of one’s day precisely as desired, eating the freshest, healthiest available foods precisely as desired—is not mere simplicity. (Simplicity, so often used to describe the way Georgia worked and lived, is almost never what it seems!) It was a real luxury simply out of reach for most people. What’s so easy to retroactively admire about the artist’s specter, and to even interpret as discipline or asceticism, has much more to do with the Kardashians shaking plastic takeout salad containers in their compound than anything genuinely instructive for you and I (assuming you are not shaking a plastic takeout salad container from your compound as you read).

And not even Georgia O’Keeffe could eat, walk, or will herself to perfect health.

It wasn’t just about what she put into her body or the “health” of that body. The aesthetics of her body mattered to her, too. In her letters with Alfred, I was also struck by how often Georgia’s weight is mentioned—though these instances are in response to the debilitating effects wrought on Georgia’s recuperating body by various illnesses. Alfred, for his part, was always in favor of eating more and gaining more weight. This was advice Georgia seemed to have some difficulty following, however; she braced herself for her visiting nurse sister, Ida, and her inevitable remarks on her thinness. “In fact I’m as fat as I ever am,” she reported, somewhat defensively, to Alfred in 1918 amidst her lingering flu.12 In 1933, Alfred reflected: “For many years I was terribly worried about your weight—I knew it was not right—I enjoy seeing you enjoy your food & that you eat aplenty.”13

After all, she was at one point as much a famous body as she was an artist. Alfred’s nude photographs of her, which he debuted down the hall from her paintings in a 1921 exhibition at his gallery, influenced interpretations of her work for decades (and still do). It would be remarkable for anyone to shake off the bodily effect of that. Aspects of her diet—in particular, the agar appetite suppressant—and the nature of the nutrition advice she followed—Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit—and such items in her possession as a 1959 brochure, Your Figure Just Right, suggest at least some subscription to maintaining an “ideal” body weight throughout her life. (My grandmother also kept an incredibly depressing recipe for “Peel-A-Pound Soup.”)

I don’t mean to pry too much into one woman’s body or her relationship to it. That is an ultimately private and, to some extent, unknowable matter. But in the written archive of Georgia O’Keeffe, there is unfortunately far more to respond to regarding the aesthetics of other people’s bodies. If Georgia met a fat person, she remarked on it—privately, albeit—to Alfred, particularly in her late twenties and thirties. So-and-so’s “fat wife.” So-and-so’s mother? “Fat.”14 As the head of a college art department in Texas, she took aim at one colleague in particular, the professor of Latin, on matters both philosophical and aesthetic: “I’m aiming to give the Fatty the jolt of his life.” “I’d like to scalp that fat old Latin creature.”15 Around the same time, she also remarked on weight fluctuations of her youngest sister, Claudia, who came to stay with her in Texas in 1916: “She has gained six pounds.”16 (Their mother had just died of tuberculosis—thus the transfer of care.) Her letters to Claudia throughout the 1940s and 50s blur the lines between parental and sibling in tone, with plenty of advice regarding diet and exercise.17

As Georgia accumulated wealth and a high level of control in the design of her daily life, what may have remained semi-private, personal prejudices got mixed up and baked into her broader design-and-life philosophy. In 2016, the ceramicist and former assistant-to-Georgia-O’Keeffe, Juan Hamilton, delivered a perfect crystallization of this troubling lens in an interview with Harper’s BAZAAR:

“Hamilton still isn’t quite sure exactly why O’Keeffe took to him over her many admirers, but he has a few theories. ‘I think it was because I was available, I was young, and I was tall and thin—she liked thin people,’ he says. ‘She didn't want any overweight people around her. She was high-minded about everything, not just art. She was very specific about the dimensions of things, the placement of a window, where the light comes in. The magic of how you put a flower in a vase, how you put the vase on a table.’”18

An aesthetic philosophy that excludes and discards fat people is no visionary “magic” or matter of artistic pedagogy. It’s body fascism.19 (Would there be multiple published volumes dedicated to what Georgia ate if she was fat?)

I find myself turning this all over in my mind as my Instagram algorithm becomes an onslaught of “wellness” insanity: “HERE’S WHAT I EAT IN A DAY!” etc. (Maybe your algorithm is not like this—perhaps I encourage it by not looking away, even if only to categorize the patterns.) Mere curiosity is an insufficient answer to why these videos go viral. These aren’t instructional cooking how-to’s or recipes, but a head of a different beast, something more specific, something darker. “HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT AS A PETITE WOMAN!” Of course the algorithm knows or has guessed that I’m under 5'4"—and then it swiftly began showing “before-and-after” content of women with my weight as the “before.” GLP-1 advertisements at every single streaming commercial break assure me I can lose 30 pounds and I will be “Better on Ro!” (Your figure just right—redux!)

When will we be free of this? Not any time soon under this administration, when thinness is so intrinsically linked with fascism.20

Besides a little pantry-ogling, there hasn’t been much press given to Georgia’s kitchen since the 2020 auction of the artist’s recipes cards or the 2017 publication of Dinner with Georgia O’Keeffe—well timed with the 2017 exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern at the Brooklyn Museum, which helped repackage the artist as something of a retroactive influencer for a new generation. But I can imagine an easy, romanticized look-back, given the numerous paths we’re taking in response to an administration obsessed with pretending to make us “healthy” again while destabilizing trust in food science and weakening the regulatory abilities of the FDA21—homesteading, “clean” eating, even doomsday-canning.

If there’s one thing you take away from Georgia’s kitchen, let it be Margaret Wood’s note that not every meal had to include meat. But look up and, instead, ask the people you love what they’re eating. Ask them if they’re hungry.

Subscribe now

Notes & Updates

This one was a little different (and personal)—thank you for reading! I am planning to take most of the summer off longform writing for this newsletter, so I will be back with my next big, long essay in September—but I’m hoping to get a shorter series started in the next few months! (Fingers crossed.)

I may have something to say between now and then in my other newsletter.

Until then! <3

Lost in Space

Queer, erratic musings on art and science fiction

By Missy J. Kennedy

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Pluribus as well as Breaking Bad.

“The O’Keeffe looks good in here.” This line, delivered with complete approval by all of human consciousness now occupying the shell of a woman’s body—and every living body left on earth aside from 13 immune “survivors”—refers to a middle-aged lesbian’s living room. (And no doubt such sentiments have been expressed across the living rooms of many middle-aged lesbians.) But the “O’Keeffe” isn’t a reproduction, it’s the original: Bella Donna, 1939, plucked straight from the walls of a deserted Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

As May Rude writes for Out Magazine, the cantankerous protagonist of Pluribus, Carol Sturka, may very well be the “last lesbian on earth.”1 Gone are individual identities, subsumed by a shared consciousness that retains the memories and knowledge of all joined together but speaks collectively, and impersonally, as “we.” The primary mission of the hive mind is to convert those left unaltered by the virus, which can only be accomplished by tailoring new strains to each survivor’s DNA. Because they operate under a strict moral code, they cannot lie about their motives and require consent to extract the needed stem cells from each survivor. Thus, they divert as much attention as possible away from the clinical realities of their operations by catering elaborately to the survivors until they can be joined with the hive. Millions of bodies await at beck and call to serve each remaining individual. Having swiftly centralized all the earth’s resources, they can deliver anything, anywhere, to any of its survivors—like an Amazon Hive. The specific bodies of departed loved ones are summoned to accompany and soothe survivors as seemingly earthly companions. This absurd seduction, too, is part of the conversion. Join us, they promise, and it will only get better.

For Carol, whose wife did not survive the initial infection, this is a tougher sell. Grumpy by nature and grieving twofold (her partner and the world she knew), she violently rejects the hive’s advances, alienates her fellow survivors, drinks heavily, and searches wildly for a means of reversal—an antidote of sorts. And when she pushes the hive too far, twice sending her assigned “chaperone” (who has been selected to represent Carol’s ideal woman) to the hospital—once by inadvertently setting off a hand grenade, then by attempting to induce anesthesia to aid interrogation—their response is to vacate Albuquerque, where Carol lives, effectively isolating her from all human contact. “Our feelings for you haven’t changed, Carol,” insists the prerecorded message that answers all her outgoing calls. “But after everything that’s happened, we just need a little space.”

Carol herself is the first to point out the eerie similarities of the hive’s tactics to conversion therapy: “If you’re so accepting, then what about what you’re trying to do to me now?” Having consumed the mind of Helen, Carol’s wife, before she died, the hive is also in possession of the knowledge that, as a teenager, Carol was sent to a conversion therapy camp by her mother; as in other carceral settings, solitary confinement is a notorious form of punishment doled out to its captives.

Carol’s 40 days of isolation drive her to paint COME BACK on her street as penitence to the omniscient hive. In the meantime, she had given up and given in to the apocalyptic comforts available to her—golfing on empty courses or driving shots straight into abandoned office building windows, joyriding abandoned sports cars, soaking in hot springs, and strolling through the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. There, she lingered in front of Bella Donna before taking it back home with her, where it usurped the humble poster version she’d had framed on the walls of her home before. She had, as the hive hoped, exhibited the necessary “change of heart;” in other words, she had revealed a new, raw vulnerability to the mechanisms of distraction and reward. (“The O’Keeffe looks good in here.”)

The most surface-level reading of Pluribus positions Bella Donna as a symbol of retaliatory conquest disguised as reward: You take my world, I take this painting. Symbolically, it’s also an apt choice for Carol, a romance novelist at the height of her success. In 1939, Georgia, too, was reaching the peak of her career, both for reaping the fruits in her lifetime and for gaining notoriety that would last far beyond it. This is not the most famous iteration of these white flowers that she painted, which are not actually belladonna (more commonly known as deadly nightshade), but datura. (Precisely identifying her subjects was neither a strength nor priority of the artist.) Her 1932 painting of three trumpeting datura flowers held the all-time record for the highest-grossing sale of art by a woman artist, dead or alive (sold in 2014 to Walmart heiress Alice Walton), for more than a decade until Frida Kahlo’s El Sueño (La Cama) sold for $54.7 million in 2025.2

Visually, Bella Donna even evokes the nature of the mind virus: Where does one flower end and the next begin?

Subscribe now

To Carol, where two had grimly become one in Helen’s death, this painting no doubt tethers her to their bond in life. There is also an erotic loneliness to that reminder, to the intertwining folds of the embracing flowers. And as soon as the hive catches a whiff of this particular longing in Carol, the collectively animated body of Carol’s beautiful “chaperone” leans in for the kiss.

Pluribus is not showrunner Vince Galligan’s first onscreen Georgia O’Keeffe reference. Breaking Bad includes a haunting flashback to Jesse Pinkman’s date with Jane Margolis at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum—before Jane’s overdose and death at the end of the previous season. Here, Galligan plays with the levity of the gaze so often casually bestowed upon Georgia’s work: “Yo, I thought I was gonna see some, like, vaginas,” Jesse complains. Like Galligan with the viewer, Jane lures Jesse in with a wink to get him to look closer, to think more deeply: “I didn’t say she actually painted vaginas. I said some of her paintings looked like vaginas.”

The typical invocation of Georgia O’Keeffe in most entertainment media starts and ends here. What do her close-up flower paintings represent? Family Guy animates the artist making a suggestive V shape with her fingers held up to her tongue. In an episode of The Sopranos, Meadow watches as a woman’s face opens into a flower-like monster and hisses “Kiss me!” on the TV (from a rented VHS tape of 1987 horror-comedy Howling III) and stops making out with her boyfriend to blurt out, “Georgia O’Keeffe!” On RuPaul’s Drag Race, Ru appraises a floral-inspired look on the runway and, approvingly, declares, “Georgia O’Queef!”

Perennially, someone will post one of her particularly suggestive paintings to Reddit or TikTok to ask, in varying degrees of earnestness: WHAT THE F*CK?! And someone else nearly always pulls up to tow our minds out of the proverbial gutter. A TikTok posted by @depthsofwikipedia captioned, “rip georgia o’keeffe you would have loved yonic cross sections of hazelnut truffles” (which really made me snort) reveals a microcosm of a philosophical art debate in the comments:

“those paintings were not painted to be yonic. flowers just ARE yonic and no one else has done such close up paintings of them.”

“oh wow she denied it? well that settles it i guess. one person officially thinks they don’t look yonic. and you i guess. so, two.”

“respect an artist’s intent.”

“the artist’s job is to paint. the viewer’s job is to view. signed, an actual artist who’s sold art at juried shows.”

“she literally just wanted to paint flowers”

“me learning the word yonic through these comments”

“what does yonic mean”

“is that the girl from breaking bad”

What matters more: the viewer’s interpretation or the artist’s intent? Whether they know it or not, a new generation has taken up the torch once carried by feminist scholars determined to set the artist’s story straight (in more ways than one!) in the years after her death—reformatted and retold for the bite-size, “Did you know?” information-as-content economy. One reply to the yonic-hazelnut TikTok neatly states the inciting grievance: “men in the art community and her husband were actually the ones that sexualized her paintings :/”.

@depthsofwikipediarip georgia o’keeffe you would have loved yonic cross sections of hazelnut truffles </3

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

It bears repeating in nearly every installment of this newsletter how irrevocably Georgia’s career was shaped by the influence of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz. More than twenty years her senior, and considered by many “the father of modern photography,” Alfred was an influential patron and exhibitor of American art in New York. He was the first to show Georgia’s art while she was still living and teaching in Texas. And the show he hung in his gallery, a selection of her charcoal drawings and watercolors, represented a mix of abstractions and snapshots derived as much from her emotional landscape as the ones around her. Years before her infamous close-up flower paintings first graced the gallery’s walls, Alfred’s debut of his “woman on paper” and its reception set the tone for every exhibition that would follow. In 1916, the Christian Science Monitor published: “Miss O’Keeffe looks within herself and draws with unconscious naïveté what purports to be the innermost unfolding of a girl’s being, like the germinating of a flower.”3 (Emphasis mine.) “Miss O’Keeffe” was nearly thirty years old!

A friend recounted the moment Alfred had first glimpsed Georgia’s work in a letter, quoting him as saying, “I’d know she was a woman—look at that line.”4

In some ways, it wouldn’t have mattered what or how Georgia painted, as art critics (mostly men) held gendered views of everything women created. Alfred even went as far as to ask Georgia if she knew what inspired her seemingly subconscious or “automatic” work. To which, she replied: “Do you think I’m an idiot?”5 Her retort wasn’t far off; his and early critics’ responses to Georgia reflected a shared colonial, patriarchal, and Freudian belief system that viewed abstract art as the “sublimation” of unmet desire—and the further away your proximity to white manhood, the less control you had over such sublimations and, therefore, the less “intellectualized” and “analytical” those expressions were.6

Alfred’s initial interest in Georgia’s work was akin to fetishization for what he considered “primitive” art; to boost gallery traffic during a lull in his own artistic career, he had put on four showcases of children’s art and an exhibit dedicated to African sculpture, the first of its kind in the United States. The title? Statuary in Wood by African Savages: The Root of Modern Art.7 As a “primitivist,” Alfred simultaneously promoted art by marginalized people while reinforcing the harmful artifices and stereotypes by which their subjugation had been justified—an artful trap. “A woman artist, Stieglitz had come to believe, could be one of those ‘intuitive geniuses [who] have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience,” writes curator Sarah Greenough, who edited the vast compilation of the first half of his shared correspondence with Georgia:8

Alfred had showcased other women before Georgia, including painters Katherine Rhoades and Marion H. Beckett. (Married to his first wife since 1893—the year Georgia turned six—he was nonetheless in the grips of an epistolary flirtation and infatuation with Katherine when he met Georgia.) In 1907, he had exhibited the spiritualist, automatic watercolors of Pamela Coleman Smith, the illustrator of the Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot.9 (At forty-two, he was also rumored to have had an affair with the twenty-eight year old Pamela.10) And he had shown photographs by Anne Brigman, who posed either her own or the nude bodies of other women in striking natural landscapes. In Georgia’s subjective abstractions and obligation and/or willingness to pose for Alfred’s camera (his photographs and their affair began while she was still recovering from the long flu that had forced her to take a leave from her teaching job; he had offered her medical care and a year to paint), he found the crown jewel of his collection and the ultimate photographic muse.

Even Georgia’s sparest, least biomorphic abstractions were filtered through a rigidly gendered lens. Blue Lines X became one of Alfred’s most cherished paintings; he told Georgia he wished to be buried with it.11 (Another of Alfred’s favorites would become Georgia’s 1926 close-up, Black Iris, which he saw as her own, uh, flower—upon which he bestowed the nickname “Fluffy.”12) As biographer Carolyn Burke notes, these lines seemed in his eyes “emblematic of the sexes.”13 Georgia’s early work appealed to his worldview as much as his senses, if not moreso; her abstractions were like Rorschach tests, and to him they “seemed to demonstrate ideas about sexual difference to which he subscribed.”14 And while Georgia would come to dread reading what the critics had to say about her art—and would routinely fall ill after the opening of a new exhibit as a result of that stress—in 1916, she barely registered it. Her mother was dying of tuberculosis.

Georgia wrote to Alfred: “Last night I dreamed—A very bad dream about Mama—and I thought my hands were on her face. I know the shape of it so well because I’ve rubbed her head so much and felt her face so often […] I would make my dream—but I know I couldn’t stand it to stay in the same building with it overnight.”15 But she did give shape to her dream, in clay: a small figure hunched forward, which she had cast in ghostly white-lacquered bronze, bearing a striking resemblance to Pamela Coleman Smith’s tarot illustration for the V of Cups.

Beyond early childhood paintings, student work, and the odd illustration, very little survives of Georgia’s work pre-1915, the year she turned twenty-eight. Her twenties had been marked by serious illness (a severe measles infection that left her unable to work for a year), sporadic continued education, soul-grinding work as a commercial illustrator, and, finally, teaching positions for which she had to uproot herself every year or so. And while plenty taxing in their own ways, these teaching jobs at last left her enough time and inspiration to work on her own art.

As Alfred continued promoting her work in New York—and as Georgia moved through grief and took on the care of her teenaged sister, Claudia—she was still so physically and mentally far removed from the way others were beginning to interpret her work across the country. In Texas, a neighbor said her abstractions looked like she must have had a stomachache while she painted them; she was the odd duck in the small town of Canyon, but the wide, endless plains and nearby Palo Duro Canyon invigorated her. The company of her sister, too, and a few like-minded friends (often more-than friends) kept her alive and inspired.

Georgia was living—walking out into the sunset alone for as many miles as she pleased, scrambling down the rock walls of the canyon with Claudia, going out for drives, and fooling around. “So many people had kissed me in such a short time—and I had liked them all and let them all,”16 she recalled. Always a step ahead of her times, she then painted a series of essentially nude selfies, alchemizing her earthly revelations in expressive watercolors made sitting on the floor in front of a mirror. As she created them, she told Alfred they were as much of the landscape around her as they were of her own body, reflected in the rich reds and primordial blues she used. And she knew better than to leave these lying around her rented guest room—had she not sent them to Alfred to hang on his gallery’s walls, she said she would have had to burn them.17 (You can imagine Alfred’s delight!)

Her artistic legacy preceded her, built on the patriarchal values and considerable imagination of one side of a long-distance correspondence. And viewers brought with them largely unshakeable beliefs that “women were fundamentally different from Western men—less objective or cerebral, more emotional, sensual, and capable of divining higher powers—their art should also be different from that by men.”18 And this is precisely what she recoiled against. All her grief, joy, and agency—flattened into latent desire (for men) of Woman. It made her physically ill. She made career-defining decisions to try to escape this, to best “the men” at subjects they deemed masculine (for example, her skyscrapers) and to carve out a fresh territory of her own by transplanting her life and work to New Mexico.

Long before she ever painted any of her infamous flowers, even before she arrived in New York as Alfred’s live-in protégé, the stage had been set for Georgia.

To dispel a sexist interpretation an artist rejected is an admirable undertaking, but context matters. We can look at any of her paintings of a flower and, in good faith, still see a yoni. It’s alright, you haven’t killed her a second time! What she rejected was “the men” in the art world and their loaded opinions; in 1925, she wrote to ask Mabel Dodge Luhan to write an article on her work: “I feel there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can explore.”19 We are not the Freudian art critics of the 1920s, driving her immune system haywire with our salacious frothing. We are not her overbearing husband. Georgia had herself a good four decades of peace after Alfred’s death, and in that time she worked diligently to distance herself from his recreation of her. She did not remarry, but surrounded herself with friends and companions—and a lot of them were queer (to use the reclaimed parlance of our times) and a lot of them were women.

It doesn’t matter what we can claim to “prove” about Georgia’s sexuality. But it matters that Pluribus’ Carol loves women, lost and grieved her wife, and plucked one of Georgia’s flowers off the wall. As in Breaking Bad, the O’Keeffe isn’t just set dressing. Breaking Bad’s Jane and Jessie stand memorialized before a painting of a door, a subject Georgia painted more than twenty times. The repetition is central to their conversation at and outside of the museum, an apt parallel for the cycles they are trapped in, a metaphor for the paths and lives that disappear behind us all as we open certain doors and thereby close others. In Pluribus, Georgia’s twin flowers are in part a wink to women who love women, who love Georgia O’Keeffe, who claim her as one of their own. Because what so often and easily follows the blind clinical sterilization of those flowers is the silent extermination of the very possibility of queer life along with it, subsumed by homogenous purity.

Ironically, Jane offers perhaps the best interpretation of the flowers as casually as a shrug: “Georgia O’Keeffe painted all kinds of stuff—everyday items, her surroundings. Some of it evoked an erotic nature; it’s who she was.”

I happen to think Georgia would quietly approve.

Subscribe now

Notes & Updates

I watched Pluribus in one sitting the day the president of the United States carried out, in his sleep, the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela. Of course, that fact had been almost entirely pushed out of my brain by what’s happening in Minnesota. I am both horrified (by ICE’s actions) and heartened (by the response of Minnesotans), and it feels utterly wrong to be sending this many words (or any) that don’t acknowledge that. And watching Pluribus’ character, Manousos—the lone survivor in Paraguay—cross a borderless (though heavily even if politely surveilled) Pan-American highway by car and foot was upsettingly surreal.

For my own benefit, and maybe also yours, I am going to type out some things that we can do, that are worth doing:

• Donate to immigration bond funds. The Midwest Immigration Bond Fund now pays bonds for residents of Minnesota in addition to Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Wisconsin—regardless of where ICE detains them.

• Divest from companies with ICE contracts with our wallets. (It works. It’s working.)

• Call our representatives and tell them to defund ICE.

• Give money or time to mutual aid networks in our neighborhoods.

• Look for protests or other actions to take in our own cities. (In Austin, the police are signing agreements to hand over our neighbors to ICE.)

And on an utterly inconsequential note, a recent essay on Them, “What if Gay Guys Were Normal About P**sy?”, using Georgia’s 1923 painting Untitled (Flower) as its feature image compelled me to create my first serious front-facing-camera reel on Instagram. I thought doing more of these kinds of videos on TikTok specifically would be part of my newsletter “strategy” for 2026, but this week I deleted my account with a colorful message to its new owner instead. If you see the yonic hazlenut girl while you’re scrolling, can you send this essay to her?

There’s so much more to say about Pluribus, Georgia O’Keeffe, and colonization. (It also matters that Carol acts like a ballistic “Karen” for pretty much the entire series.) I talked about Georgia O’Keeffe’s one-woman colonization of New Mexico more in my last essay, via her paintings of the bones she collected there. And I thought this TikTok by @sihaamspirals drew parallels between Carol’s and Georgia’s isolation so perfectly. A comment adds: “Carol didn’t understand the Belladonna or O’Keeffe on more than just the surface. As beautiful as it [is], her art is off the back of Manifest Destiny that paved the way for her to even move to New Mexico.” And, like the animals that once carried the bones she painted, Georgia didn’t even understand the native datura she mistook for belladonna.

@sihaamspiralsever since i saw the latest pluribus episode, all i can think about is georgia okeefe ⛰️🎨 the parallels between carol and georgia, the hive mind and georgia, new mexico, who the earth belongs to, colonization… like im deep in my research rn 📓🙂‍↔️ #pluribus #appletv #painting #newmexico #carolsturka

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Thank you for reading. I’ll be back again in April.

I am working on a proper essay for January, which I meant to publish this November and then in December. But alas, it did not come together in time.

So this year, I published a mere three times. This frequency doesn’t seem like much to remark upon, but the numbers tell me there are close to five times more of you who might be choosing to see this by some means than this time last year. (Don’t worry! This isn’t an inside-baseball post about growth on this platform.) And the numbers also tell me I sent out 13,620 words here this year.

The Numbers

• 240+ new subscribers in total

• 150+ new “followers” on the app

• 162 likes on the year’s top essay

• 4,500 words per essay (on average)

The Essays

What happened? A couple things: I didn’t go “viral,” but one of my essays really popped off, for lack of better description. I wrote a long-time-coming essay crystallizing the connections I’d been drawing between Georgia O’Keeffe, Joan Didion, and Martha Stewart. After the Martha documentary came out in October of last year, her name stayed on our lips long after. And I watched Gen Z women discover Joan Didion with the same (at times uncritical) fervor I experienced some years ago while “thought daughter” essays proliferated on Substack.

In other words, I had the sense and evidence that I was tapping into something current rather than the usual nagging idea that latches into my brain like a latent thought virus and remains dormant for years. I am a slow thinker. I cannot skate artfully on the surface; I fall through. And when I finally hit publish, my brilliant friend Alejandra Oliva immediately shared it. Then Esmé Weijun Wang shared it. And all year, friends and mutuals shared and recommended my newsletter. When Katy Kelleher recommended it and then went truly “viral” herself in the Substack Post, my phone blew up with a small wave of overlapping followers.

Subscribe now

Community and friendship, as they say, are magic. And so are grudges—which is why my favorite thing I wrote this year was actually my inquiry into what makes art conservative and why George W. Bush’s art is so disingenuous (and mediocre). Hating Bush was my personal political awakening. He broke the USPS. He defined the social and political culture I grew up in. And he’s an O’Keeffe fan.

I read more books this year than I’ve perhaps ever read in a calendar year before. (A number I will not be sharing!) This is largely thanks to the personal discovery that I do enjoy many novels but prefer to ingest them via audiobook format. Historically, I have read mostly nonfiction (which may not surprise readers of some or all of 2025’s 13,620 words), and I have some catching up to do. I have been listening to Ursula K. Le Guin’s fiction while following along in her nonfiction on paper. Her postmodern characterizations of the archetypal stages of a woman’s life in her 1976 essay, “The Space Crone,” helped me understand why O’Keeffe is so often invoked at a surface level and how O’Keeffe herself enabled this pattern.

The Silence

One planned and unplanned break each this year derailed my bimonthly schedule. I took the summer off to work on my long(er)form project manuscript and to spend half of July in Chicago via long-haul train from Texas (for the second summer in a row). I got a lot of that other writing done and sent out some time-intensive applications for grants and funding (and was named a finalist for the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Money for Women awards).

Then, in October, my little senior dog got sick and stayed continuously sick for 35 days. I tried to remain calm, bringing my book to the waiting room of the after-hours vet. But by the end of the month, I was just boiling turkey and dissociating. After a lot of medication and fluids, he recovered. (The diagnosis: A tummy most upset!) New readers may not know that he is a perfect reading companion. As soon as he recovered, my day job kicked into overdrive. It took most of December to get the gears of my brain turning again (I watched a lot of RuPaul’s Drag Race while waiting).

The Outlook

Besides the essay I’m working on for January, I have three more in the hopper. I hope to write them all in 2026. I have other ideas for this space, too (like audio, like a short(er)form “O’Keeffe of the Month” bonus, etc.), but I also want to spend a lot more time on my manuscript. I want to spend more time writing, period. 2025 was a pretty good year for that. I won’t lie and tell you I feel great about where we’re all collectively headed in 2026, because I really don’t.

But writing is a light in the dark. Thank you for your light this year.

Parting Note & Question

If you didn’t like this, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again for another year! Back to our regularly irregularly scheduled programming shortly.

Do you have a favorite Georgia O’Keeffe painting? Will you write to me and tell me what it is or share in a comment? I would love to start a bonus series here just going long (but shorter form) on the context of a particular painting each month.

Share

Not long after I severed myself from the Evangelical1 church, I found Georgia O’Keeffe.

After dabbling with reading tarot cards and Greek mythology (a typical ex-evangelical pipeline), in her I had found another kind of oracle—a secular one. An independent, determined, creative woman who lived and aged unabashedly to wide admiration and nearly 100 hundred years on this earth, she had walked a fine tightrope between celebrity and privacy and seemed to have won. I thought there was so much I could learn from someone like her, and I was far from the first person to see her that way. Between the 1950s and 1980s, Georgia opened hundreds of letters sent to her in New Mexico, a large volume of which came from white women across the country who identified themselves as housewives.

Like those housewives, I was hungry for mold-breaking examples like hers. Had she still been alive, I would have written to her, too. In an analysis of Georgia’s fan mail, scholar Linda M. Grasso cuts to the beating heart of this collective, decades-long parasocial relationship: “In a number of ways, women who wrote fan letters to O’Keeffe made meaning of conditions and experiences that impelled, and shaped, feminism in these decades. How the writers imagine O’Keeffe, respond to her paintings, and create an epistolary relationship reveals a great deal about how they negotiate being female. […] O’Keeffe appeals especially to white women as model, validation, and imaginative possibility.”2

I still see her invoked this way by (mostly white) women in newsletters, on social media, blog posts, and other outlets. (These are the available equivalent formats for our times, as the subject no longer lives to read our letters.) In death, she has become canonized—by the power vested in pop culture—as a kind of secular saint, whose continual study of both natural and emotional landscapes can be called upon to inspire attention to the world around and within us. Enduring photographs of her weathered, wry visage seem to offer abundant stores of wisdom and resilience. And while she resisted gendered discussions of her legacy as a woman artist, her private words also seem to grant, with a wink, a deeper understanding of her life and work to the category of woman: “I feel there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can explore.”3

In 1976, as the artist neared her 89th birthday, the writer Ursula K. Le Guin, too, negotiated a change of the “female” condition: menopause. In her essay “The Space Crone,” she writes: “The entire life of a woman from ten or twelve through seventy or eighty has become secular, uniform, changeless.” The mixed-bag of modern conditions—an unraveling of the meaning and importance of “virginity,” access to birth control, and women’s sexual desire somewhat unbridled yet menopause still taboo—had done away with the traditional archetypal phases of a woman’s life (from Maiden to Mother, Enchantress/Wild Woman, and Crone/Wise Woman): “It requires fantastical determination now to become a Crone.”4

The author of the cult classic Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (a book I inevitably encountered post-evangelicalism, of which more than 2.7 million copies have sold5), Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, writes: “Who is the crone? She is the most dangerous, the most radical, the most revolutionary woman in existence. Whether in fairy tales or in consensual reality, the old one goes where she wants to and she acts as she wishes; she lives as she chooses. And this is all as it should be. And no one can stop her.”6

Le Guin continues: “The woman who is willing to make that change must become pregnant with herself, at last. She must bear herself, her third self, her old age, with travail and alone.”7

Subscribe now

It seemed to me (and to the housewives) on some instinctive level that this was exactly what Georgia had done. After the death of her famous (but not as famous) husband, she reinvented her private life and public image in New Mexico—and central to that image reinvention was her likeness, photographed unflinchingly in all its aging, wizened glory. Amidst an ever-escalating contemporary discourse around anti-aging treatments and surgeries, Georgia’s untouched, unfiltered (and also likely under-sunscreened) face is still something of a rarity among such celebrities—consider, without judgement, the stunning and accomplished Jane Fonda’s face today at 87. For Georgia, the wrinkles were part of the brand that sought to distance itself from its own younger model; that long life was hard-won.

Beyond possessing the face of a (beautiful) Crone, Georgia’s new backdrop gave a faraway flair; multiple publications christened her the “high priestess of the desert.” The backdrop of a sacred mountain on native land in an adobe home built by a white man in the imitation of a native Pueblo style layered upon Georgia an empty air of spirituality to white people who viewed these surroundings uncritically (myself and the housewives included). Her repetitive studies of the Taos Pueblo and Hopi katsina tihu (exhibited under the Westernized moniker “kachina”8), while not specifically commissioned by the U.S. government, were undertaken alongside similar government-funded projects that sought to “document” indigenous art and culture while ushering in decades of building projects and promoting tourism to New Mexico. The terrible irony of white fetishization of indigenous land and cultures, a feeding force behind tourism to New Mexico—both in O’Keeffe’s lifetime and now, partly thanks to her, far beyond it—is of course that white colonizers violently resettled these lands and attempted to eradicate indigenous people and cultures alike in the first place.

But one of Georgia’s New Mexico subjects may appear on its surface perfectly neutral, natural, and meditative, an enduring tool of her artistic and archetypal alchemy. (“Tend to the bones,” is one of Pinkola Estés’ instructions for the contemporary Wild Woman.9) “They were most wonderful against the Blue,” Georgia wrote, “that Blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.”10

To the untrained eye, bones do not betray how they came to be bare and bleached. But the stories of any bones are not clean ones—and the stories of Georgia’s are inextricably bound up in that very destruction she claimed to hold in contempt.

“There’s a wall of pelvises at the Museum of Fine Arts,” my friend in Boston reports overhearing at their office. Another friend planning to attend the exhibit offers to investigate, texting me a photograph of three cerulean canvases. Like the Fates, the pelvis-eye-views are grouped together and alone on an otherwise bare wall: Pelvis with Distance (1943), Pelvis IV (1944), and Pelvis with Pedernal (1943). The paintings on the wall, here and throughout the exhibit, create the backdrop for sculptures by both the painter and the British artist, Henry Moore.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore, which completed its run in January, is one of a handful of recent projects placing Georgia in a now pretty uncommon position—a shared spotlight. Another example is Through the Long Desert: Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright, a comparative study and catalogue examining the artists’ lives and intermittent friendship by architectural historian Sarah Raving.

In Georgia’s lifetime, a solo museum exhibition was unprecedented; the major retrospective given in her honor by the Museum of Modern Art in 1946 was the first ever for a woman artist. In museums today, we frequently encounter her art—even her casual photography and wardrobe—alone, held up as unquestionably exceptional and seemingly peerless. Last year’s Georgia O’Keeffe: My New Yorks presented her city paintings in an ahistorical “vacuum,” pointed out by journalist and architecture critic Kate Wagner in the New York Review of Architecture.11

Some of this distance is the result of a well-intentioned feminist overcorrection to the influence of her husband, the gregarious and overbearing photographer and collector Alfred Stieglitz. He gave Georgia plenty of solo shows in his own small (yet influential) galleries, but he also debuted her as a naive schoolteacher among men and displayed his own intimate photography of her nude body down the hall from her paintings. Predominantly male critics, already biased against women, seemed never to forget this dual exhibition; they had a field day with her work, finding explicitly sexual and inescapably feminine meanings in representational paintings and abstractions alike. Most arrogantly, they assumed these intimate “female” revelations were offerings to their own (male) gaze.

As Alfred’s pure “woman on paper,” plucked out of Texas and then pinned naked to the wall for New York’s art world to behold, Georgia had publicly experienced, as Le Guin describes, woman’s first “change from the sacred to the profane.”12 Many O’Keeffe scholars and biographers posit that escaping this gaze motivated Georgia to begin working with bones. The theory isn’t hard to believe or imagine—TRY SEXUALIZING THIS, JERK!—though it’s another one the artist rejected. But you could argue that Georgia, as Susan Sontag crystallized in 1966’s Against Interpretation, generally found most modes of modern interpretation dubious—and Freudian interpretation in particular, as it was the primary mode Georgia’s critics operated in.13

The bones didn’t save her from Freud. Back in Lake George after spending the summer of 1930 in Taos, Georgia wrote to a friend: “I have been working on the trash I brought along,” referring to the bones she had collected in New Mexico that summer to ship back east. “My bones cause much comment,” she added cryptically. It didn’t take long for Alfred to want a piece of the action; as usual, while Georgia worked out her approach to new work, he developed photographs that definitively and bodily fused artist and subject from his own perspective. (Alfred was sure to let her know, however, that her new artistic focus strayed from his perfect feminine vision: “My real feeling for you is in only a couple of the very fine nudes.”) The early “comment” of Alfred and his family was mere overture for the critics’ “shock” at the presumed allusions to death that would follow the exhibition of the bone paintings.14

Georgia’s elegantly arranged compositions of bones, stones, and flowers evoke to many the tradition of memento mori—Latin for “remember you must die”—and vanitas paintings, which feature the typical stuff of traditional still life—candles, fruit, flowers—made uncanny by the presence of a skull. These arrangements were intended to remind the viewer of the inevitability of death and the ultimate futility of earthly possessions. Georgia’s reference to the “Blue” of the sky seen through the stereoscope of the pelvic bones that would outlast “all man’s destruction” certainly seems a meditation on this theme. But perhaps she didn’t think so herself or meant this more as a playful jab; known to liberally revise her stance on subjects over the years, Georgia’s correspondence from the early 1930s corroborates the impishness captured in Perry Miller Adato’s documentary footage of the artist in her nineties. Of one of her earliest and best known bone paintings, Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose (1931), Georgia wrote to Alfred: “I really don’t know why I laugh because it really isn’t funny—only seems funny to me.” And in 1976, she stated decisively for the camera: “The bones do not symbolize death to me. They are shapes that I enjoy. It never occurs to me that they have anything to do with death—they are very lively!”15

Georgia undertook another of her skull paintings (Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue, 1931) with a more intentional flippancy: “That was at the time that the men were all talking about the great American novel, the great American play, the great American—oh, it was the great American everything. And I thought they didn’t know anything about America! A lot them had never been across the Hudson. So I thought I’ll make my picture red, white, and blue—I’ll make it an American painting for these people who don’t go across the Hudson.”16

By 1931, Georgia had lived in Wisconsin, Chicago, Virginia, South Carolina, Texas, and New York City. She had also spent several summers in New Mexico but always as a guest at the homes of white, wealthy friends who had moved there from New York or Boston. And after enough seasons spent sharing close quarters with big personalities, she opted instead to stay at the guest lodge called Ghost Ranch, run by the son of a Cleveland timber millionaire turned conservationist, where she would become a polarizing fixture. (Other guests included the family of Robert Wood Johnson, of Johnson & Johnson.) And it was from the owner of this lodge Georgia purchased her first rustic home in 1940, the very same he had built for his own family in the imitative Pueblo Revival style.

“During the 1940s, painting in the midst of war, O’Keeffe sought peace,” reads the placard for O’Keeffe and Moore’s “pelvis wall” at the exhibit. An interesting accompaniment; perhaps Georgia sought peace from Alfred Stieglitz. But what she sought in New Mexico during wartime was a property within the village of Abiquiú, with water access for a garden, so that she could hire a gardener, cook, and housekeepers and work without having to drive into town for food or borrow from her neighbors. This “peace” disrupted the local community considerably.17

The village of Abiquiú18 had been granted to the families of thirty-four freed slaves by the Spanish government in 1754—not as a benevolent act of good will, but to put distance and other bodies between the families in the Spanish settlements and the Plains Indians beyond the Spanish-held frontier. These individuals, known as Genízaros, had been abducted and displaced from their Hopi, Kiowa, Pawnee, Wichita, Paiute, Navajo, Ute, Apache, and Comanche tribes and sold into slavery to Spanish households. The Mexican government hadn’t challenged their land grant, but after the Treaty of Hidalgo ended the Mexican–American war and brought New Mexico under the control of the United States government, the U.S. established the Surveyor General’s Office of the Territory of New Mexico to attempt to validate all previous and individual land grants within the new legal system.19

The U.S. had agreed to recognize the property of Mexican citizens on paper but required expensive, exhausting documentation to formalize verbal agreements that had been passed down orally through families. Not only was this process new and bewildering, the U.S. government made little effort to explain it—let alone in Spanish. Individual landowners were responsible for crossing the red tape needed to obtain legal rights to their generational land; Forest Service rangers were given the power to arrest those who refused to try. This utter negligence and aggressive enforcement left the region vulnerable to opportunistic land speculators, who swooped in on the newly expanded railroad with legal loopholes or outright lies to coerce residents into ceding much of their old lands into new hands. And the U.S. government itself seized millions of acres of common land once used for shared grazing, hunting, and gathering—called the ejido and held by multiple members of communities like Abiquiú who stewarded it—as unclaimed public domain, including for the Carson and Santa Fe National Forests.20

In her attempts to purchase and lease land from Abiquenos—including plots that had been defended by families for generations or were communally managed—Georgia bulldozed past local agreements and painful history in pursuit of what she wanted. (Pinkola Estés’ words now echo darkly: “She acts as she wishes; she lives as she chooses. […] And no one can stop her.”21)

In 1945, months after the United States detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki the atomic bombs that had been devised a mere twenty-five miles south (as the radiated crow flies) in Los Alamos, Georgia got ahold of the Abiquiú plot she had long coveted. She had no doubt sized it up approvingly for its “good bones.”

Georgia’s new eighteen-room hacienda had previously been owned by José Maria Chávez, a notorious military general from a prominent Spanish family who had killed and enslaved countless indigenous people under the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. occupations of Abiquiú. The house had a room without windows that locked from the outside, where Chávez imprisoned his captives overnight. He called it the “Ute Room.” After the home was renovated to her liking, Georgia furnished this room with an Eames chair and called it the “Indian Room.”22

Georgia’s time in northern New Mexico overlapped with another devastating depopulation; the landscape she encountered in the 1930s was almost literally littered with bones. A blizzard during the particularly brutal winter of 1931 had killed thousands of the local livestock. In 1934, the U.S. Forest Service had, under the Taylor Grazing Act, employed local men to undertake the grueling work of laying barbed wire across the valley. When the local horses ripped defiantly through this new fencing and an attempt to herd them was unsuccessful, the Forest Service ordered them shot. A resident recalled: “Bones were everywhere and the countryside smelled of dead animals. For years after, every watering hole was littered with the skeletons of horses.” Without cars or other transportation, many had depended on these horses for survival.23 And between 1933 and 1946, the Bureau of Indian Affairs removed half the Navajo sheep population of the Four Corners region under the Navajo Livestock Reduction Act, sometimes slaughtering them and leaving the carcasses on the reservation.24

If Georgia knew these recent or ongoing events (and it’s quite likely she did), she didn’t seem too troubled by them. As one art critic noted presciently in the 1930s: “I imagine that she saw these ghostly relics merely as elegant shapes.”25

While it may have been difficult or impossible to confirm the exact species whose skeletons she referenced, many of these bones would likely have been recovered from yet-decomposing carcasses (and Georgia was photographed handling one in such a state). She often misidentified the animal bones in the exhibited titles of her paintings and sometimes did not name them at all; she did not identify the types of pelvises on display at O’Keeffe and Moore. Based on recent archaeological studies, the pelvic bones seem most likely to have belonged to the cattle who died in the winter of ’31 or horses gunned down by the Forest Services. The skull she noted as a ram’s in Ram’s Skull with Brown Leaves (1936) actually belonged to a Spanish goat; many of the sheep skulls Georgia recorded in her collection were in fact from goats. In a few cases, and with perhaps more intention, she seems to have combined bones from a variety of species, creating a kind of science-fiction hybrid mule.26 (Returning to Ursula K. Le Guin: “Into the space ship, Granny.”27)

Georgia’s example in New Mexico is an instructive one, though not for imitation. Examined with hard, clear eyes, the urgent lesson is to allow ourselves to be pulled beneath the surface.

Her true devotion was not to the living inhabitants of her adopted backyard—not their names, their histories, nor their complete stories, gristle and all—but to the shapes, colors, and light she saw first, and to reporting what she saw through her eyes only. What did those bones mean to her neighbors? Did moving them from where they lay stir up those feelings again, that unspeakable pain?

“Attention without feeling,” Mary Oliver writes, “is only a report. An openness—an empathy—was necessary if the attention was to matter.”28

Robin Wall Kimmerer instructs us: “Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.”29

Subscribe now

Notes & Updates

Hello, and thank you for reading! Some time has certainly passed since my last post in April. I took a much-needed summer break after hitting more than 16,000 words(!) here to work on the overall research project that drives this newsletter.

I sent out applications for grants and funding and was named a finalist for the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Money for Women awards. To that end (which is to say, continuing to seek time and support for this project), I continue to use affiliate links through Bookshop.org wherever possible in my footnotes. If you feel inspired to purchase one of the books linked in my references section, I will make 10% of the cover price.

I have also turned on paid subscriptions here if you would like to help support me! I have a paid subscriber–only series planned for 2026, but I plan to keep these bimonthly (mostly), heavily researched, longform essays free to read, so think of a subscription as a monthly/annual tip toward that effort. FYI, the monthly subscription amount is $5; if you try to sign up for this in the Apple Substack app and see a higher price, do it from your computer instead. (Apple adds/takes a 30% fee on top of the regular price that doesn’t go to the writer.)

I also wrote an essay about Georgia O’Keeffe and another of her most popular subjects for an independent (print!) zine whose publisher I found through Substack, and I’m excited to share more about that when the time comes.

I have also been thinking, for many reasons, about the conservative Evangelical dogma that drives so much political thought in the U.S. I cannot more highly recommend Jeanna Kadlec’s book, Heretic: A Queer Revolt Against Evangelicalism, Empire, and the Lies We Are Sold (newly released in paperback!), to anyone who grew up in these spaces or who wants to make sense of them now.

I am always thinking about the intersection of current events and history alike when it comes to our pop-culture fixations like Georgia O’Keeffe. To reopen a space for other kinds of writing, I relaunched my more personal newsletter, Lost in Space (which I began in the days of Tiny Letter!), where I will mostly be writing about other kinds of art (movies, books, etc.) and science fiction.

I’ll be back here with more Georgia O’Keeffe in November. (I promise!)

(Special thanks to Haley E.D. Houseman who reported to me from O’Keeffe and Moore in Boston to inform this newsletter.)

Lost in Space

Queer, erratic musings on art and science fiction

By Missy J. Kennedy

Before the CIA funded modern art as a Cold War operative, the U.S. Department of State purchased a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe.1

Under the New Deal administration inherited by Harry S. Truman, $49,000 had been earmarked for the State Department to purchase paintings by then-contemporary American artists—today, the equivalent of about $855,000.2 The paintings were bound for an ambitious world tour of the countries determined by the U.S. government to be most susceptible to communism. The exhibit, conspicuously dubbed Advancing American Art, marketed the fruits of free expression through seventy-nine works by forty-five painters, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper.

After debuting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the fall of 1946, the exhibit made it as far as Paris, Prague, Havana, and Port-au-Prince. A holdover of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brand of “international liberalism”—foreign policy aimed at pushing liberal democracy through global institutions and markets—the U.S. taxpayer–funded exhibit was an easy target for the newly elected Republican majority that took control at the start of 1947.3

Championing free expression abroad requires at least tolerating it at home. Thus, the paintings selected by the State Department did not present a necessarily rosy image of socioeconomic or political conditions in America but were meant to showcase the “exceptionalism” of liberated and unfettered American artists—most with liberal to leftist political leanings—working across abstraction, cubism, surrealism, and social realism.4 Following impressionism and post-impressionism, these and other nonrepresentational movements had more or less converged under the amorphous umbrella of modern art, united in their radical departure from realism or in challenging traditional conventions of what and who warranted representation.

Conservatives united in their revulsion. “The roots of most of the State Department collection, these artists will tell you, are not in America—but in the alien cultures, ideas, philosophies, and sickness of Europe,” ran the NY Journal American.5 “Modern art is Communistic because it is distorted and ugly,” later squawked Republican Michigan representative, George Anthony Dondero, “because it does not glorify our beautiful country and smiling people and our material progress. Art that does not glorify our country, in plain, simple terms, breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government and those who create it and promote it are enemies.”6

Truman turned away from the legacy of his predecessor and doubled down, calling the works on display “ham and eggs” art, decreeing all of modern art “merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy people” (condemning many of the artists to whom Roosevelt had provided direct aid and jobs throughout the Great Depression), and ordering the early cancellation of the traveling exhibit.7 However, that year he also established the CIA, whose divisions would later come to include the Propaganda Assets Inventory, the International Organizations Division, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the latter of which subsidized and organized other touring exhibits of modern art, particularly abstract expressionism, toward the very same end as Roosevelt’s—quietly this time.8 (You can read more about that in a recent edition of Anjela Freja’s newsletter, The Shape of Everything.)

Subscribe now

By the time the State Department came knocking, Georgia O’Keeffe was ready to enjoy the fruits of her own artistic labor. The taxpayer-funded acquisition from her estate in 1946 came on the heels of the Museum of Modern Art’s major retrospective exhibition given in her honor that spring—the museum’s first for a woman artist. It was also likely one of the last purchases to be overseen by her husband and dealer, Alfred Stieglitz, who died that summer.9

Approaching her sixties, Georgia’s most prolific days were behind her. Her famous flowers, cropped close to their interior anatomies, and the suggestive folds and forms of her pure abstractions—like 1923’s Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow—exhibited alongside the nude photographs her husband had made of her, had already shocked the “male, conservative” gaze of the old-guard art world.10 She had already turned a roving precisionist’s attention to New York City’s skyscrapers, even playing like a cubist with perspective and depth in 1932’s vibrant, celebratory Manhattan. And she had long been telegramming her New Mexico visions back east through sensuous earthen hills and dry, spare bones; with a wink, she had even made her “great American” painting with one of these artifacts in 1931’s Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue.11

But from Georgia O’Keeffe, the State Department purchased a humble cabbage—a skunk cabbage, which is not actually a cabbage, but one of New England’s most pungent and earliest blooming wild plants. Painted in 1926, the idiosyncratically named Cos Cob does not seem likely to have been a particular target for Republican ire among the other works on display—especially not, for example, compared to the Russian-born Anton Refregier’s End of the Conference, which departs from conventional perspective and representation while still conveying palpable political frustration.12 After all, Cos Cob resembles something—a leaf, or a tree, or Swiss chard, maybe lettuce, maybe cabbage—that is ultimately inoffensive, even if not widely seen as particularly worthy of our attention.13 In other words, it’s a safe painting, even by the artist’s own standards. The most conservative critic might have scratched their head incredulously, wondering how exactly this not-cabbage was the best that American artists had to offer.

Cos Cob is not exactly an affront to realism, but it does provide a handy lesson in abstraction. Imagine, the dusty projector clicks in the silent lecture hall: Is it abstract? (Don’t ask Kandinsky!) The leaf-or-tree-like form is instantly familiar if not completely placeable. We know it’s something vegetal. The close-up perspective, tight cropping, and minimal background upend our sense of scale. We get no real hints from Georgia’s characteristic non-texture, either. The only answer lies in the violet field tucked into the bottom left corner. Here, she painted the sparest suggestion of the plant’s characteristic hooded spathe, concealing out of the viewer’s site the fuzzy green spadix within. (Spathes and spadices describe the cloak-and-candle anatomy also found in the calla lily and the Jack-in-the-pulpit, other frequent subjects of Georgia’s.)

In a 2018 reconsideration and nearly complete re-exhibition of Advancing American Art (re-dubbed Art Interrupted), the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma justified Cos Cobb in its exhibit guide: “Abstraction does not mean a painting won’t resemble recognizable subject matter. In this example, Georgia O’Keeffe exaggerates and isolates one leaf of a skunk cabbage to help the viewer focus on something often overlooked—the simple beauty of nature.”14 (After the initial interruption, the State Department reclassified the paintings as “war assets” so they could be auctioned off, but the War Assets Administration also granted state or federally funded universities an automatic 95% discount. The University of Oklahoma purchased Cos Cobb for only $50.15)

Like most of her subjects, Georgia painted the skunk cabbage multiple times. In the spring of 1922, she stayed at the Connecticut home of her friends and art collectors, Alma and Maurice Wertheim, in the affluent Cos Cob neighborhood.16 Cos Cob is neither the most abstract nor the most literal product of its series. But it’s an almost perfect example of the kind of abstraction that would come to mark Georgia’s career: a simple, recognizable subject rendered bone-smooth by skilled hands, stylized and decluttered of inessential details by trained eyes. The flowers, the fruits, the bones, the shells, the people-less landscapes—these paintings can all still be clearly identified and delineated according to their subject matter. Like flowers? You’re sure to find a print to hang above your fireplace, up-close and suggestively yonic or held at a safer distance—dealer’s choice.

Georgia’s paintings ask us to look more closely—not at whom, but what.

And then what?

In 2016, a docent at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum told my tour group that the Bushes—as in George W. Bush—were “O’Keeffe people.” According to the lore, they—the Bushes—had been the second-highest bidder in the auction for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, with the record-shattering sale (for art by a woman artist) of $44.4 million in 2014.17 The identity of the buyer, Walmart heiress Alice Walton, is now easily verifiable, but I have never been able to confirm the Bushes’ involvement in the auction. But at Laura Bush’s personal request, Jimson Weed hung in the White House for six years of the eight-year Bush administration. (Georgia’s 1930 landscape painting, Mountain at Bear Lake—Taos is part of the White House’s permanent art collection.)18

George W. Bush had himself been a subject of attention in art news just a year prior, for his baffling bathroom self-portraiture released by email hackers in a twist that now feels like a fever dream.19 Objectively, the paintings resemble what extraterrestrial aliens who have just learned about human introspection might produce in earnest imitation. In one, Bush even serves up his white man’s nothing-burger homage to Frida Kahlo’s What the Water Gave Me (1938). He had hired a painting teacher, Georgia-based artist Bonnie Flood, and moved on to dog portraiture (where perhaps he should have stayed), painting for up to six hours each day.20 “He picked it up so quick, it just was amazing actually,” Flood remarked of the retired eldest son of a $400-million political family dynasty sunsetting into unfathomable free time on an ex-president’s pension.21

I grew up in George W. Bush’s America, in a conservative, evangelical K–12 school system before, during, and after his two-term administration. Every morning, we recited our allegiance to the flag and then the cross. On September 11, 2001, I dug my pen against the cover of my youth bible, scribbling blankly, waiting with the rest of the school’s stragglers in a classroom where they’d wheeled a TV cart in to watch the planes hit the towers again and again until our parents could get off their shifts to come pick us up. From that day on, I watched as Bush was transfigured from an unremarkable Republican into a mouthpiece for God to the teachers, parents, and—by immature osmosis—most of the students around me. But my parents had ambled open-mindedly into Christianity in their forties. They had enough doubts to turn down the Kool-Aid and didn’t buy the trickle-down economics that Bush otherwise represented. And they hadn’t yet realized that conservative politics were practically prerequisite for this prosperity gospel–imbued breed of Christianity.22 My dad was a letter carrier and a union steward. “Bush” was a four-letter word at our dinner table.23

By the time Bush left office, his approval rating had tanked.24 With the 2008 financial crisis, the the Iraq War, and the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on his hands, the added personal embarrassment of his leaked amateur artwork seemed enough to keep him quiet for the rest of time. But the fever dream continues; Bush got cocky. “There’s a Rembrandt trapped in this body,” he said to his tutor, retold for laughs to Jay Leno. “Your job is to find it.”25

From dogs, he moved on to the world leaders he’d met while in office—starting with portraits of himself (this time, out of the bathroom and mercifully clothed) and his father, George H. W. Bush, before moving on to Tony Blair, Stephen Harper, Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Nicolas Sarkozy, Lee Myung-bak, and even Vladimir Putin (among many others). By 2014, these portraits were proudly mounted at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum.26

And then, in a two-act turn, he shifted his easel toward the controversies of his administration. In 2017, Bush published Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors, a selection of 66 portraits of veterans. The book made the New York Times bestseller list, and the newspaper swiftly ran a bootlicking review: “‘W.’ and the Art of Redemption.”27 In 2020 came Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants. A CBS Good Morning special records Bush grinning and driving a golf cart around his sprawling Texas ranch and toward his painting studio before donning an air of seriousness to say, flatly, “I hope I can set a tone that is more respectful about the immigrant.”28

Bush’s war machine churned 170,300 U.S. troops in and (for some) out of Iraq, killing 4,492 and leaving 32,292 veterans wounded.29 In the same 2023 roundup, NBC’s Meet the Press estimates approximately 200,000 Iraqi civilians killed (Iraqi troops are not counted), a cowardly calculation that rings hollow against a 2008 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that counted more than 600,000 deaths between 2002–2006 alone.30 Brown University researchers found that post–9/11 U.S.-led invasions could be responsible for as many as 4.7 million deaths across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.31

In the wake of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, Bush signed the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act into law. The Patriot Act granted (and still grants) the U.S. government broad, Orwellian authority to surveil citizens and residents and to incarcerate immigrants indefinitely without charges.32 The Homeland Security Act elevated the Department of Homeland Security to an executive branch and created Customs and Border Protection, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE. (As Alejandra Oliva quoted for The Injustice Report, ICE’s acting director now wants to see the “business” of deportation run “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”33) It’s impossible to calculate how many people have been deported since 9/11, but each presidential administration since has overseen the removal of millions.34

By the sheer, dumb contrast that can be achieved by placing basically any human being in context with Donald Trump, Bush’s image has enjoyed something of a lukewarm rehabilitation in the last decade. Bush has, to some, always had enough of that increasingly meaningless quality we call respectability, which means, I guess, that he can deliver a more or less coherent sentence without showing too much emotion, without overtly insulting everyone, and without too many factual errors. Bush laughs! He has friends! Even Ellen DeGeneres and Michelle Obama like him. “Our rehabilitations are softer, more insidious,” wrote Susan Sontag of liberal democracies in 1975.35

And the Bushes are O’Keeffe people.

Ironically, the question of whether or not a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe could be considered “conservative” came before an Indiana judge last year. In the 1960s, Valparaiso University, a private Lutheran institution (and one of the only universities emphatically recommended by the teachers and staff of my former high school), purchased Rust Red Hills (1930) with a private gift whose donor had stipulated that only “conservative” art works could be acquired with the funds. The controversial purchase was made thanks to then-professor Richard Brauer (for whom the university’s art museum is named), who persuaded the committee, including a reluctant appointee of the private trust, to expand the university’s primarily 19th-century collection to include more modern works.36

Facing declining enrollment, Valparaiso argued in court that it had the grounds to break the stipulations of the trust and sell Rust Red Hills, as well as The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate (1914) by impressionist Childe Hassam, because the purchase was a violation of the trust to begin with—the painting was not “conservative.” The court ruled in its favor, allowing the sale.37 Critics of the decision, including former director of the Brauer Museum of Art, Jonathan Canning, saw the university’s argument as a mere “legal tactic that did not make sense in a museum context.”38

There’s something to this argument, though—not in its implied value judgement of “conservative” over modern art, but in its reflection of actual conservative tastes. What kind of art do conservatives like? Painting in broad strokes, conservatives want art to look like something. (The satirical but entirely believable headline, “Ben Shapiro Criticizes Georgia O’Keeffe Paintings for Not Looking like Anything,” originally posted by The Hard Times in 2021, has recently been recirculated via Instagram.) Art that on its surface appears realistic, traditional, and “beautiful” is the perfect representation of conservative ideals. And Western American art is the ultimate conservative art form.

Consider another painting that hung in the White House during the Bush administration: Frank Reough’s The Approaching Herd (1902). What could be more American, more respectable, than a herd of Longhorn cattle on a wide-open prairie? But all Western American art is a violent fiction. The cattle are not native to North America—they were brought over by Spanish colonizers. And how did the prairie come to be so empty? How have millions come to be deported?

Rust Red Hills may not be conservative in the formalist sense, but its perspective is nearly identical, if gender-swapped. Western American art for the wives of conservatives. Colonization with a feminine touch.

Georgia did not always paint this way. Ironically, she did some of her most radical work in Texas at the tail end of its cattle-driving days; the manufactured scenes that Frank Reough and other Western American artists traveled to capture were all around her. In Amarillo and Canyon, she saw and heard the cattle along the horizon and visited them in their pens at night where they overnighted before continuing north along the railroads. She certainly could have painted cattle-pocked landscapes if she wanted to, but, beginning in 1914, she’d made a conscious departure from the representational mimicry of her student days.

Instead, she got onto the floor of her rented room, angled a mirror toward her naked body, and painted, in dripping reds and blues, what she saw. As a student in New York in 1912, she had seen Auguste Rodin’s erotic watercolor drawings on display at the Met. In washes of pinkish red and scribbles of pencil, Rodin had depicted the working-class women he employed (and often slept with) as models, including ballet and cabaret dancers and sex workers, asking them to “wander about, to remain natural, not to adopt poses.” Several of the watercolors even depict a “Sapphic” couple intimately entwined.39

The artist Paul Klee, who saw the works in 1902 in Prague, saw in Rodin’s gaze the “woman as animal, and, in a certain rather strange way, woman as idol. […] It is hideous and overpowering, and it has the beauty of every supreme energy. […] Nothing more obscene has ever been made, but it is voluptuousness that has the nobility of an idea, or of an abstract form.”40

With her own series of nudes, Georgia subverted the male gaze of “woman as animal” by replacing it with her own: woman as herself, as held in her own gaze. If Rodin’s watercolors were controversial, hers were unthinkable.

When Georgia painted this series in 1917, she was waging a one-woman war against a conservative school administration. “I just knocked everybody’s head against the wall and made hash,” she recalled. The West Texas State Normal College (today, West Texas A&M University) in Canyon was chiefly concerned with preparing future Texas educators. But the young, new head of its art department had other ideas, ditching the prescribed textbooks and instructing her students to draw and paint directly from their surroundings rather than copy printed images, cultivating their own creativity over conformity. Georgia dressed and spoke plainly, skipped church on Sundays (technically a requirement of her employment), walked barefoot and rode in cars with men (technically forbidden for women), delivered lively if polarizing talks on art to her fellow faculty members, and treated her students as individuals and even friends.41

As the U.S. entered World War I, she couldn’t stomach seeing so many of them enlist and ship off before graduating. To Georgia, the best and brightest seemed as doomed as the cattle. But Amy Von Lintel, professor of art history and director of gender studies at West Texas A&M, points out in the introduction to Georgia O’Keeffe’s Wartime Texas Letters, Georgia was neither a patriot nor a pacifist. She advised students against enlisting but was not moved toward collective action or dissent. Rather, the war made her more zealous about her own work; she even described her output as a “war path.”42

Georgia was no conservative, but she was an individualist. And she believed unshakably in American exceptionalism. “One cannot be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America, and then work,” she said.43 Would she have objected to her paintings hanging in the White House during the Bush administration? She accepted awards from Gerald Ford and Ronald Regan during their presidencies, so likely not. And she avoided political themes and language in her work.

But every landscape is political. As Olivia Laing writes of the etymology of “landscape”—a term that originated through the act of painting colonized places rather than describing them naturally—landscape painting is often presented on its surface as “profoundly apolitical, in a way that is itself political.”44

Georgia knew this. She just believed in the rightness of her own perspective, her own manifest destiny. In New Mexico, she got everything she could ever want: a house of her own (two, actually), achingly beautiful views to paint repetitively, a series of loyal, beautiful dogs, solitude when she wanted it, and a revolving door of friends and companions when she didn’t—all scaffolded by the labor of those who lived in the village that would be irrevocably disrupted by her long-term presence. At 90, she reflected, “When I got to New Mexico, that was mine.” Today, you can still watch her say this to the camera.45 But this sentiment is often waved away as symbolic, to argue that she didn’t really mean it. But I think she did.

Like her country’s forefathers and its presidents, she came to believe that a place could belong to her and to her alone.

Subscribe now

Notes & Updates

Thanks for reading and subscribing. This edition went out to a lot of new readers, thanks to folks sharing and engaging with my last post on Georgia O’Keeffe, Joan Didion, and Martha Stewart. I hope you enjoyed this edition, too. If you did, I ask you to find a local immigration bond fund through the National Bail Fund Network and make a donation.

Just a reminder that I’m using affiliate links through Bookshop.org wherever possible in my footnotes, though there aren’t as many books cited in this edition. But if you purchase one of the books linked in my references section, I will make 10% of the cover price.

If you haven’t already done so, you should buy and read Alejandra Oliva’s book: Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration.

Joan Didion had a type. It was a cutout, which few men and fewer others could pass through, in the shape of the cowboy-costumed silhouette of John Wayne. Tough, decisive, self-assured. Good health, good looks. Strong, sturdy stuff. Humble, no-nonsense origins—nothing and everything to suggest the individual who later emerged, fully formed and seemingly without a past. And “into this perfect mold,” Joan wrote of John Wayne, “might be poured the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost.”1

Like John Wayne, the women who passed Joan’s muster spoke to a past real or imagined. In the contemporary feminism—the (white, middle-class) women’s movement Joan profiled in 1972—she saw an aggrandized self-victimization, writing of the “dolorous phantasm” of the new “imagined Everywoman,” who was “raped on every date, raped by her husband, and raped finally on the abortionist’s table.” Yes, “many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping,” she wrote, but “nobody forces women to buy the package.”2

Don’t complain about the hand you’ve been dealt—play the game and win. And those who did, to Joan, were pioneer women.

Subscribe now

Joan saw in her pioneer women what she prized most in herself. Recounting for The Year of Magical Thinking the sudden death of her husband to a heart attack at their dinner table, she told us how the attending social worker called her a “cool customer,” repeating it like an absurd (but true) mantra. In 2024’s delicious Didion & Babitz, Lili Anolik points out her emphasis on this observation, that she quoted it “ironically, but not really. Really, quoted it sentimentally. She was taken with the description. It’s how she saw herself. How she wanted to be seen.”3 After all, she came from people who had truly—and successfully—crossed the trail. As she often reminded us, her ancestors travelled with the Donner Party but parted ways as the ill-fated group took the newly claimed shortcut that would snow them in that fateful winter; sensibly, her kin stuck to the path already forged.4

In 1973, Joan Didion and her daughter stood in an airy stairwell before Georgia O’Keeffe’s twenty-four-foot-wide Sky above Clouds IV. Just four years earlier (and just two essays back in The White Album), she had ridiculed the idea, circulating then in Ms. magazine, of critically examining the gendered themes of fairy tales with one’s children. Now, she proudly employed her daughter’s instinctive prodding at ideas of authorship in the lede of her essay on the artist. The child had asked who made the painting. When told, she replied, “I need to talk to her.”

“My daughter was making, that day in Chicago, an entirely unconscious but quite basic assumption about people and the work they do. She was assuming that the glory she saw in the work reflected a glory in its maker, that the painting was the painter as the poem is the poet, that every choice one made alone—every word chosen or rejected, every brush stroke laid or not laid down—betrayed one’s character. Style is character. It seemed to me that afternoon that I had rarely seen so instinctive an application of this familiar principal, and I recall being pleased not only that my daughter responded to style as character but that it was Georgia O’Keeffe’s particular style to which she responded: this was a hard woman who had imposed her 192 square feet of clouds on Chicago.”5

And this, she told us, is a virtue. When she emphasized, “Style is character,” she returned to an idea she’d first explored in her 1961 Vogue essay, “On Self Respect.” “People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues.”6

In Didion & Babitz, Lili Anolik characterizes Joan’s writing on Georgia O’Keeffe as her “one unequivocally admiring piece on a woman.” In The White Album, it concludes the brief section of Joan’s essays on “Women,” preceded by the derisive “The Women’s Movement” and the almost-but-not-quite piteous “Doris Lessing.” By the time the page flips to “Georgia O’Keeffe,” one is tensed for a fight; instead, Joan’s prose practically swoons. No other essay of hers is more sentimental or romantic, save her tribute to John Wayne. I’d have been half-tempted to Google “Joan Didion bisexual icon?” had I not just read her apparent advice to lesbians—GROW UP!—in “The Women’s Movement.” (I’m paraphrasing—slightly.)

“‘Hardness’ has not been in our century a quality much admired in women, nor in the past twenty years has it even been in official favor for men,” Joan went on about Georgia, letting her readers who happened to be men know that Georgia had out-swaggered them all—sorry! “She is simply hard, a straight-shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees.” The line wobbled around in my head as I read Didion & Babitz, which quoted Joan’s husband’s 1978 description of his young self as, by contrast, a “receptacle of received wisdom.”

It was not just Sky above Clouds IV that Joan was responding to. The meat of her essay is cut from the text Georgia had written herself for her eponymous, self-curated catalogue, published in 1976 shortly after her eighty-ninth birthday. The book, like Joan’s essay, opens: “Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant.” In the pages that follow, Georgia then went on to tell us her own fairy tale version of where she was from and how and where she had lived.

Unimportant? Joan didn’t buy that for one second—to her, where one came from was everything. Footage of Joan collaged into her nephew Griffin Dunne’s 2017 documentary for Netflix (Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold) shows the writer pondering: “Don’t you think sometimes people are formed by the landscape they grow up in? It formed everything I ever think, or ever do, or am.” Like Joan more distantly, Georgia descended from Europeans who had traveled across swaths of North America to their new homes, at least partly by actual oxcart. (The various family journeys that converged at Georgia’s birth in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, are recounted thoroughly in Roxana Robinson’s Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.) Georgia’s grandmother, Isabella Wyckoff, who made the journey as a child, kept a “tiny” pioneer’s diary, containing an entry that read: “I Came West. April 1854.”7

Born to the previous century, Georgia was, to Joan, a vestige of a past that was fast-fading, was perhaps already gone, a last link to a tougher breed of women like those from her own family: “These women in my family would seem to have been pragmatic and in their deepest instincts clinically radical, given to breaking clean with everyone and everything they knew. […] The past could be jettisoned, children buried, and parents left behind, but seeds got carried.”8

Breaking clean. Clean of received wisdom. Joan would have recognized this “pioneer” logic in more than a few pieces of the narrative Georgia gave the world in 1976: her upbringing on a dairy farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin; her teenage and young adult years punctuated by the need to uproot herself perennially to new places for school and work; her mid-career move West from New York to New Mexico; and, most important to Georgia, the retold story of her singular artistic genesis.

“It was in the fall of 1915 that I first had the idea that what I had been taught was of little value to me except for the use of my materials as a language—charcoal, pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, pastel, and oil. […] I decided to start anew—to strip away what I had been taught—to accept as true my own thinking. […] I began with charcoal and paper and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white. I believe it was June before I needed blue.”9

To strip away what I had been taught. It’s not the unfiltered truth, but, as anyone who has sat across the table from a reminiscing aging person knows, it’s not exactly a lie either. It’s the hardening of harder truths into simpler stories. (“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan wrote.10) Georgia’s letters from 1915, to art school friend Anita Pollitzer, reveal these hard strokes to be far shakier: “I made a crazy thing last week—charcoal—somewhat like myself—like I was feeling—keenly alive—but not much point to it at all—Something wonderful about it all—but it looks lost—I am lost, you know.”11 The true story is far less Promethean, too. In the same letter, she references Picasso and a painting by John Marin. And as biographer Benita Eisler points out in the introduction to the letters between Georgia and Anita, the women frequently and passionately discussed other art, books, ideas, and influences—effectively, if informally, continuing one another’s education. (“In the nineteenth century—still not far from the America of 1916—women’s friendship had been an instrument of self-education,” Eisler writes.12)

The stylistically skeptical Joan bought the simpler (and, notably, peerless) pioneer version as if Georgia had passed it down to her with her recipe for cornbread—partly, perhaps, out of respect or a rare kind of reverence. She had been primed to proselytize this tale by Georgia’s own hand in leading the press. While Joan tried to make sense of the 70s in her notebooks, Georgia had already lived nearly nine decades of a very full life that ultimately, improbably, led her West—where at the end of the trail she outlived and eclipsed her powerful husband and opened her fan mail. (Alfred Stieglitz is no household name!) Georgia confirmed things that Joan had sensed to be true for many years—about the grit and perseverance of certain women—things she worried were changing, disappearing even.

Not many women came along who made Joan feel like that.

Less than ten years after Joan Didion’s tribute, Georgia O’Keeffe died—a bright star to guide the trail ahead, gone dark. Then, at the turn of a new millennium, Joan booted up a computer, sat down, and typed:

“This is not a story about a woman who made the best of traditional skills. This is a story about a woman who did her own IPO. This is the ‘woman’s pluck’ story, the dust-bowl story, the burying-your-child-on-the-trail story, the I-will-never-go-hungry-again story, the Mildred Pierce story, the story about how the sheer nerve of even professionally unskilled women can prevail, show the men; the story that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men.”13

This was Joan in the year 2000, who did not yet know the double-sided grief—of losing her husband and daughter less than three years apart—that new and old readers would come to know her for through The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. This was Joan trolling the internet and stumbling curiously onto the early phenomenon of fan sites, digging up the pioneer woman from her unmarked grave beside the trail to animate a new but not unlikely subject: Martha Stewart.

The “women’s pluck” story, the dust-bowl story, the burying-your-child-on-the-trail story, the I-will-never-go-hungry-again story, continues and concludes:

“The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”14

Joan’s words—from an essay titled “Everywoman.com” and published in The New Yorker—are read throughout the 2024 Netflix documentary Martha, to Martha’s measured approval (calling it “a very astute essay”). The essay is perhaps Joan’s second “unequivocally admiring piece on a woman,”15 to return to Lili Anolik’s characterization. For Georgia, Joan painted a brief but heroic fairytale of a hard, remarkable woman; for Martha, Joan took up her sword and slashed point-by-point through Martha’s critics, who then included anonymous website users, unauthorized biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, and the general and ungenerous milieu of the press coverage and talk show interrogations sampled throughout the documentary. These criticisms orbited around Martha’s alleged perfectionism, ruthlessness, and temper. (Martha would not be indicted until 2003, the year Joan’s husband died.) Joan qualified these allegations as so many “insignificant immaturities and economies,” insufficient evidence of true “character flaws.”

If Joan recalled the “Everywoman” she once chided in her essay on the women’s movement, Martha had clearly restored something of Joan’s faith in her.

Like Georgia, Martha’s upbringing fit Joan’s pioneer typology to the letter: the second of six children (Georgia, the second of seven) born to working-class, no-nonsense parents, working capably alongside (and outshining) her siblings in her father’s garden and modeling commercially to help feed her family. She moved from New Jersey to New York for Barnard and then, after marriage, a child, and a stint as a stockbroker, not West—but to Westport. “We were like the original settlers in Westport, Connecticut,” Martha recalls in the documentary.

In Westport, Martha renovated her family’s new old farmhouse—digging gardens, sanding rough wooden floors, and painting the ceiling while listening to radio coverage of the Watergate scandal—and sowed the seeds of her domestic empire. A catering business took root first, a homemade runaway success that gave form to book after book, then a magazine, Martha Stewart Living, then the brand, the IPO: Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. And behind it all, Martha—the first “self-made” woman billionaire in the country.16

By the time Georgia became a commercially successful artist, she had for years taught visual composition to scores of students and worked as a commercial illustrator on advertisements. Even her core artistic and aesthetic philosophy, to “fill a space in a beautiful way”—influenced by the teachings of American painter, printmaker, photographer, and educator Arthur Wesley Dow, whose philosophies borrowed extensively from the traditions of Japanese woodblock printing—was to approach a canvas more as a designer than as a representational painter.17 The young Martha called upon “the Dutch masters” and her own thoroughly modern sensibilities to arrange her dreamy catering tablescapes. Both women blended fine artistic vision with a shrewd understanding of what the market craved.18

Georgia and Martha shared an affinity for Chow Chows, a distaste for boring people—particularly boring men—and even the anguish of watching their partners of twenty-something years pursue affairs with other, younger women. Neither remarried; both surpassed their former husband’s successes and became household names. These were/are women in possession of character. They were driven, resourceful, and could have continued reinventing themselves forever.

They were also, as Joan characterized of Georgia in her 1976 essay, in possession of “extreme good looks,” “astonishingly aggressive,” and bent on adherence to a certain standard. They were excellent cooks and keepers of fastidious, tasteful homes who wanted things done a certain way. With exacting vision came temper.

Spending part of each of her New Mexico years in her home in the village of Abiquiú—which employed and depended on the labor of dozens of Abequeños over the years—Georgia had her way within her own sphere of home and often, too, in the sphere of the village.19 (When Eve Babitz’s godfather, Igor Stravinsky, took her to New Mexico to meet the famous artist, a young Abequeño sat on the ground rubbing Georgia’s feet.20) The poet C. S. Merrill, who helped catalog and organize the artist’s library in 1973 (which did not include any of Joan Didion’s books on its shelves), sometimes encountered a “crabby scorpion” (Georgia may have, in fact, been a triple Scorpio and was by this point 86 years old): “When she tosses off her little abuses, I find myself keeping empty by repeating a mantra.”21

Martha revisits these kinds of criticisms as levied at Martha (and deftly minimized by Joan): “People felt abused by her.” “She got such wrong ideas about success.” “She was ruthless. In the business world, that’s a great trait for a man.”

Joan’s essays and Martha interrogate why we don’t praise women for the hardness, as Joan described it, or this ruthlessness that we have historically admired or at least accepted in men. (These texts do not more closely examine who, exactly, has admired or accepted such behavior and who has not.) They invite us to reflect on the higher, double standards to which women are still most certainly held. To be sure, Martha was abjectly and unfairly criticized for the apparent sin of daring to take herself seriously, to have such high standards for her work and her company, to not slap on an over-the-top friendly face on TV, to take domestic enterprise to scale. But I wince at her on-camera treatment of an employee: “What knife are you using to cut those? Well, isn’t that a stupid knife? Why? Why, why would you use a little knife to cut a big orange?” And I rolled my eyes when she lamented in 2023 that “America will go down the drain if people don’t return to office.”22

I have humored Joan Didion for long enough. We must now confront the pioneer woman in her full zombie fury and then, having dispensed with her, bury her back beside the trail and leave her behind us at last—for good.

By 1972, Eve Babitz had certainly had enough of Joan Didion’s pioneer drag, drafting, revising, but ultimately not gathering the nerve to send the following:

“Just think, Joan, if you were five feet eleven and wrote like you do and stuff—people’d judge you differently and your work, they’d invent reasons […] Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening? […] And you yourself keep making it more all right because you are always referring to your size. And what you do, Joan, is live in the pioneer days, a brave survivor of the Donner Pass, putting up the preserves and down the women’s movement…”23

What makes a pioneer woman? On the near-absurdist stage set by Joan, across which John Wayne strides endlessly on horseback like the rising and setting sun himself, a pioneer is a thin, white woman. (As Eve pointed out, Joan frequently reminded readers of her small size.24) A pioneer comes from a humble past, but that past does not entrap her. She is not a “victim.” She can forget the past, start up again wherever, whenever, and reinvent herself—no matter the cost.

Joan’s pioneer women are rich. Yet the pioneer woman is haunted by scarcity. She “will never go hungry again.” Scarcity breeds a kind of resourcefulness but also, generally, does not encourage many of our other better virtues to take root. Times of scarcity, like recessions, can exacerbate racist perceptions and contribute to greater racial inequalities.25 The perception of scarcity is used to divide workers and classes. Scarcity encourages the hoarding of wealth and power and permits behaviors that prioritize individual prosperity over collective gain.

No one makes a million dollars—and certainly not a billion—by the sweat of their own brow.26 Georgia and Martha were undeniably the architects behind their own successes, but the labor of others enables the rapid accumulation of such vast wealth. Is there no obligation here for (white) women to be “nice” or—please, let’s be specific with our words—kind, fair, or at the very least, accountable?

A past of scarcity permits Joan’s pioneer women to be a little “crusty,” though Joan specifically insisted that Georgia wasn’t. A little old-fashioned, a little hard, a little selfish, a little mean. (“Let’s get you to bed, grandma!”) We certainly don’t need to expect or exact thoroughly contemporary lexicons and radical politics from everyone born to previous generations. Nor do we have to throw ours out the window when rushing to their defense. But to Joan, to criticize that valuable hardness, in any of its forms or expressions, in 1976 and even in 2000 may have seemed far too risky a move in the game with the men—with the fate of the easily influenced “Everywoman” at stake. But who was seated at the table with the men to begin with? Joan’s pioneer mythology only grants permission to women (white, thin, perceived straight) who could have gotten away with bad behavior anyway.

The pioneer analogy is apt in a way that Joan does not seem to intend or at least to intend foremost—the exploitative violence enabling the lonesome frontier, the rags-to-riches pioneer success story. And one forges ahead on a far less simple, more readily implicating path when they become, say, a major employer of a small village or CEO of a billion-dollar corporation. Where Joan’s pioneer mythology becomes problematic is in imposing that terrible rightness of necessity—like pushing ahead on the trail would have seemed—every move these women have made is now reborn from it, even if the pasts they’ve outrun are far behind.

In Martha, I see someone who has quite likely reflected on her past, even if she holds a certain “crustiness” about remote work on the whole. Like Georgia when Didion wrote about the artist, Martha is now in her eighties. The world looks very different today than it did in the 1940s and 50s of her childhood in Nutley, New Jersey, the New York of the 60s when she handily mastered what was gatekept as men’s work on Wall Street, and in the 80s and 90s when she showed the nation how to handily—and artfully—master what was thought to be women’s work. And, in turn, I hope that we would have treated her trial and incarceration more kindly today than we did in the early 2000s. For her part, she has handily mastered the present moment, too—she has a podcast, an Amazon storefront, and even seems to run her own Instagram account with a casual ease and humor.27

In other words, she has moved on.

Subscribe now

Notes & Updates

I’ve started using affiliate links through Bookshop.org wherever possible in my footnotes. This means that if you are compelled to purchase one of the many O’Keeffe biographies or letter collections or other books I reference through the Bookshop link in my references section, I will make 10% of the cover price. (If you are interested in reading an O’Keeffe biography but don’t know where to begin, I’d be happy to recommend one or a few based on what you’re most interested in.)

I fell behind a month, so I’ll be back in April.

Thanks for reading and subscribing. ☺

In 1928, the year Virginia Woolf delivered the lectures that would become A Room of One’s Own, Georgia O’Keeffe reflected from the thirtieth floor of her apartment in Midtown Manhattan: “[An artist] has to have a place where he can behold the city as a unit before his eyes but at the same time have enough space left to work.” 

Speaking on the record with a male journalist for the New York Graphic, a tabloid newspaper, Georgia did not, as Virginia would, stake this claim on the grounds of gender, but of vocation. (The interview’s headline: “She Painted the Lily and Got $25,000 and Fame for Doing It! Not in a Rickety Atelier But in a Hotel Suite on the 30th Floor, Georgia O’Keefe [sic], New Find of Art World, Sets her Easel.”1) Yet a “place” of her own to work—as an artist, as a woman, and as both within her marriage to Alfred Stieglitz—was a hard-won condition she had fought for throughout the last decade and would spend the next defending.

This tension threads the otherwise serene selection of works across the 1920s and ’30s on display in Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks,” now on view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta after its debut summer at the Art Institute of Chicago. The brightest stars are the exhibit’s namesake: the saturated, large-scale skyscrapers—the Shelton, Chatham, and Beverly hotels, the Radiator Building, the Ritz tower—plus fleeting glimpses of moonlight between the backs of gleaming black monoliths and a joyful, practically cubist composite of Manhattan that looks like a cover of Vogue. Then there are those precious (and expensive) views from the thirtieth floor, looking out onto the East River. (Somewhere beneath her window, and a staged bowl of fruit to be painted, lay the Coenties Slip where, decades later, Agnes Martin, Lenore Tawney, Ellsworth Kelly, and other artists would set their easels and looms on the unsanded wood floors of abandoned commercial warehouses.) Far humbler are the quieter, still-life studies of the more ordinary objects around her that spanned these decades, whether in the city or upstate, fleshing out the textures and poetry of daily life.

By 1928, Georgia and Alfred were heading into their fourth year of marriage and could comfortably afford their high-rise apartment at the Shelton Hotel. Opened in 1923, and at the time the tallest building in the world, the Shelton was designed as a luxury apartment hotel for men—offering monthly leases and “clubhouse” amenities like billiards tables, Turkish baths, squash courts, lounges, a library, a barber shop, and a swimming pool on top of housekeeping and a cafeteria—that quickly opened its doors to women the following year. Alfred felt as though they lived on an ocean liner. Georgia painted from the sitting room, where “off-white furniture, pale gray walls, and curtainless windows” framing her view surrounded them (one almost imagines the solemn, haunting interior of the Kardashian–West compound2). Friends were shocked that not a single canvas graced the walls.3 

“I realize it’s unusual for an artist to want to work way up near the roof of a big hotel, in the heart of a roaring city,” Georgia told the New York Graphic.

“But I think that’s just what the artist of today needs for stimulus. […] Yes, contact with the city this way has certainly helped me as no amount of solitude in the country could. Today the city is something bigger, grander, more complex than ever before in history. There is a meaning in its strong warm grip we are all trying to grasp. And nothing can be gained by running away. I wouldn’t if I could.”4

Holding in your mind’s eye the lasting image of the distinguished artist who indeed left New York to live more than 2,000 miles away in northern New Mexico, perhaps nothing could be more surprising than this statement. But 1928 also marked Georgia’s tenth year as a New Yorker. Born in Wisconsin, Georgia had moved with her family to Virginia as a teenager and attended school there in Chatham as well as Chicago and New York. Working as a commercial illustrator had taken her back to Chicago, and, teaching, back to Virginia and to South Carolina and the Texas panhandle, too. In 1918, she had been living with a friend in a farmhouse outside of San Antonio, on medical leave from teaching, chronically ill with a mysterious illness (possibly influenza) she’d caught at the end of the previous year and couldn’t shake. All the way from New York, Alfred had been her patron, promoter, and long-distance pen pal since early 1916. In one of his numerous letters fretting over her health that spring, he made good on more than two years of patronage (and flirtation) and promised her a place to recover and a year to paint. “What do I want from you?” began one of his letters from that May, an incredulous, almost wounded reply to Georgia’s careful attempt to understand his true intentions before accepting. He assured her he wanted nothing more than for her to get better and to work.5

Subscribe now

One morning that June, Alfred whisked Georgia off the train in from San Antonio and into a studio on 59th Street owned by his niece, where Georgia lived as she recovered and Alfred eventually moved after separating from his wife of 25 years (brewing heiress, Emmeline Obermeyer; they had married the day after Georgia’s sixth birthday in November 1893 and would not formally divorce until 1924). Georgia and Alfred quickly became intimate and, just as quickly, he began taking the many portraits of her—many nude—that they would both become known for. He was fifty-four; she was thirty. Whenever the light was good for photographing—and for painting, too, one would imagine—he expected they would continue their uneven collaboration, which meant Georgia, barely recovered, posing for hours each day. (What did he want from her? All of her, it turned out.)6

He also wasted no time in pulling Georgia into the wider Stieglitz orbit. When he was in his late twenties, his father (a wealthy wool merchant) had bought a Queen Anne–style mansion called Oaklawn on Millionaire’s Row at Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains. Alfred and his extended family decamped there each summer, and 1918 was no exception. He and Georgia stayed at Oaklawn with all his relatives, including his mother, Hedwig—his daughter, Katharine, attended camp nearby—before settling more permanently and privately into the farmhouse on the property the following summer and every year after. Georgia and Alfred’s niece, Elizabeth, began tending to the apple trees that grew on the land, and Georgia further busied herself with an Apple Family series of still-life paintings.7

Georgia had grown up the eldest of seven siblings but had largely lived away from her own family since her teens. Her father died at the end of that first year in New York, while her mother had died of tuberculosis in 1916.8 The extent and intensity of the Stieglitz clan overwhelmed her, though Elizabeth was a welcome ally within it. (Hedwig embraced Georgia, but Katherine’s despair at her parents’ separation and understandable outrage at Georgia’s presence those first two summers didn’t make things any easier.) Biographer Carolyn Burke suggests that Georgia’s apple family portraiture explored her strange new position in this one.9

Enmeshed in the milieu of the family’s affluence, Georgia also likely experienced a class culture shock. As a child, she was used to seeing the men who worked on her father’s dairy farm in the house for breakfast each morning, but it was her mother who cooked for them.10 The uneasy responsibility of managing live-in household workers was not yet something she had experience with.

Alfred was ecstatic in the midst of the chaos. “Time and space seem to have disappeared for me—It’s an incredibly wonderful life [Georgia and I] have been leading up here … It’s all so real and so full of peace and intensity—of great livingness that I often feel it must be a trance,” he wrote that first summer to his friend and fellow photographer, Paul Strand.11

In no such trance, Georgia already began hammering out the patterns that would serve as lifelines back to herself throughout her long, demanding partnership with Alfred. First, she would need a space of her own. So she threw herself into renovating an unused shed on the Stieglitz property to use as a studio in 1919, replacing the rotting roof shingles with the help of Elizabeth and her husband. Alfred reveled in the sight of Georgia, healthy and animated, re-shingling the roof in her underwear. But he was stung to learn she intended to use the studio privately rather than share it with him and withdrew from photographing her.12

Georgia would also need real, regular time away from Alfred. Travel to other parts of the country offered this respite, as he was increasingly hesitant to leave New York. Her first invitation arrived in 1922, from friends in York Beach, Maine. She rose early, encountered lobsters scuttling around the floor of the kitchen, went on long walks, collected shells along the shore, and painted. “I am getting to something of myself here that I couldn’t get when I was with you,” she wrote to him.13 And while she missed him, she tested a resolve that would eventually allow her to split her time between New York, with Alfred, and New Mexico, without.

Other patterns emerged during these years, too. That fall, Georgia and Alfred welcomed Rebecca Strand (née Salsbury, later Salsbury James), newly wed to Paul Strand, to stay in the farmhouse at Lake George. More interested in getting to know the somewhat distant Georgia, Rebecca agreed to Alfred’s camera on her body during her daily (nude) swims. Carolyn Burke writes in Foursome: “Years later, he said that he had taken these shots to ‘prove to Paul that in [Rebecca] … he had a much more pliant and vital model than the … rather fragile O’Keeffe.’”14 

Alfred flirted shamelessly with other women, including Rebecca and Georgia’s sister Ida, who worked as a nurse and came up to the lake to help Georgia care for him after a hospitalization (for kidney stones) in 1925. In 1927, he began flirting and, frankly, obsessing over 22-year-old Dorothy Norman, a wealthy young (married) socialite and burgeoning philanthropist, who took an interest in his gallery and essentially fashioned herself into his assistant. (Alfred was 63.) By the end of the decade, their relationship had developed into a full-blown affair.15

The more Alfred sought artistic, emotional, and sexual fulfillment from other (always younger) women, the more “fragile” and distant Georgia seemed to him. But she was living through the very real consequences of his patterns. In 1921, he exhibited for the first time a selection of the photographs they had labored over in Elizabeth’s studio. Among the 45 portraits on display, several were nudes. Having been presented as the archetypal Woman Artist to galleries since 1916, it’s impossible to know exactly how much this added layer—the image of her body on display alongside her art—affected the reception of Georgia’s work (by almost entirely male critics). But by 1924, the impact on her work and her own, real body was clear. “There will be only two abstract things—or three at the most—all the rest is objective,” Georgia wrote to the novelist Sherwood Anderson, asking him to write a foreword to the forthcoming exhibit catalog that would “counter eroticizing reviews” (he refused). The chronic stress of preparing for each year’s exhibition, and no doubt its reception, often left her bedridden after its opening.16

The transformation of the teacher and watercolorist in Texas—crouched over student-grade paper on the floor of her guest lodging, unknown and free, working at expressive, dripping paintings of the landscape around her, the emotional topography within her, and the body that held her—to the refined, renowned oil painter, blocking out avocados shipped in from Mexico (the first she’d ever seen17), is almost shocking. Her 1924 show included an abstraction completed earlier that year but many more “objective” studies of avocados, pears, and callas.

Georgia’s reviews were more positive than Alfred’s, whose photographs hung in the same rooms as her work that year. She also made “several thousand dollars”18 from sales. But a critic wrote: “Psychoanalysts tell us that fruit and flowers when painted by women are an unconscious expression of [their] desire for children.”19

In 1926, at the invitation of Anita Pollitzer, a friend from Teachers College at Columbia University, Georgia delivered a speech at the National Woman’s Party convention in Washington, DC. A member of the party since its earliest inception in 1913 (thanks to Anita’s urging and influence20), Georgia spoke on her belief “in woman as an individual,” according to a reporter at the event. “An individual not merely with the rights and privileges of man, but, what is to her more important, with the same responsibilities, and chief among these is the responsibility of self-realization.” Upon return from the convention, this her own duty of self-realization, she “collapsed” from debilitating stomach pain.21

That summer, Alfred photographed his friend’s daughters nude at the lake (Ethel Tyrell and Eva Hermann, approximately 33 and 25 years old respectively) and was caught kissing the young cook, Ilse.22 Distraught and confused, Georgia left Lake George for the company of her friends in Maine. “Everything that I had ever been able to touch and to build my life on seemed shattered,” she wrote to Alfred.23

“My hurts—yes, I have hurts—make me do things I don’t really want to do—things that mean nothing whatever to me,” he wrote back. “I know that as far as the young are concerned I’ll keep my hands off. I’m making the old mistake of assuming they feel things they can’t feel as intended. I’ll make no such blunder again.” (He would meet the young Dorothy Norman the following year.)24

In a rare move for Alfred, he joined her in Maine for a few days, where they reconciled. But Georgia felt changed—within herself or in their relationship—and told him she had felt the “turning of a page” in her life. “I don’t know yet what is on the other side of it. […] I feel that only time can tell me,” she wrote.25

You’re walking at twilight—on your way home from work or an errand or visiting a city you don’t live in—and you catch, through the alleyway between two buildings, a fleeting, perfect slice of sky and moon. Maybe you stop and take out your smartphone, but the moon recedes, evading easy capture. The street light blows out the whole image in a way that doesn’t confound your animal eyes. You could come back with a tripod, with a proper camera, play with longer exposures—but the light fades, the moon shifts in the sky. And besides, you were going somewhere. Maybe you never stopped, holding the picture in your mind instead.

That you may stir with such recognition, across all time and technology, at art made nearly one-hundred years ago is what makes Georgia’s New Yorks most remarkable. She could not bring them down from the sky and arrange them upon the tablecloth for study. Nor did she stage these paintings as she did her later, omnipotent New Mexico visions—flattening the faraway perspectives of land and sky beneath floating, spectral skulls and flowers (though 1932’s Manhattan shows this approach in early practice). She captured fleeting, moving images as they are held in memory: blurring inessential details, dripping with saturation, even vibrating with the bodily echo of halted momentum in stopping to crane your neck and look. They are pedestrian in the most literal sense—grounded in real, not just artistic, perspective—active, palpable, and tethered to the pinpoint of one’s feet upon the earth.

Georgia was an avid walker and hiker throughout her life, hiking through the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains behind her family’s home in Virginia, in Palo Duro Canyon and out for miles onto the plains and into the long sunset in the Texas panhandle. At least once, she even walked the twelve miles from the town of Canyon to the canyon it was named for before even beginning the descent itself. She hiked out with groups, with friends, with her sister, Claudia, and, nearly as often, alone. While automobile ownership was not yet common, this habit was seen as uncommon, too—particularly for an unaccompanied woman (though she was free, unbothered, and relatively safe as she practiced it).26

In New York City, to walk alone was not strange at all. “As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room,” wrote Virginia Woolf in 1927, of walking through the streets of London.

“For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience. […] But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.”27

It is not surprising that some of Georgia’s most vibrant paintings from this time were inspired when she was alone and active—away from the lake and even her 30-story view—an “anonymous tramper” among so many others. By contrast, a yearning for solitude seems more present in her still-life work, particularly the paintings of the clam shells she brought back from Maine. “It is tempting to see in this new series of oils reflections of her state of mind—her need for solitude and her concern that in her isolation, she was cutting herself off from life,” writes Carolyn Burke. “O’Keeffe’s apple series had depicted the changing patterns of relationship; her enigmatic shell series meditate on the integrity of the self.”28

“If you could but learn to acquire some of the ability I have to be ‘alone’ among the restless many,” Alfred lamented to her as she fled Lake George for Maine.29 But Alfred was referring to his own family, to spaces held together by the fabric of his own upbringing, lore, and design: the Lake George property, his galleries in the city, and, before the Shelton Hotel, homes and apartments owned by relatives. Georgia was never truly free of Alfred or the whole Stieglitz family unless she left New York entirely. And she now understood he would always put himself first.

Georgia did, at some point, both read and own a copy of A Room of One’s Own. Her library also included To The Lighthouse, The Waves, and Orlando.30 While Virginia Woolf was unequivocal in her writing about women, Georgia was shiftier, harder to pin down, technically aligned with the National Woman’s Party but also often unsympathetic to other women and individualist to her core. In response to a question regarding obstacles women faced on the path to “self-realization” in 1926, she snapped: “Too much complaining and too little work.”31

What Georgia did not explicitly say about her view in 1928 was that it freed her domestically. The Shelton Hotel staff cooked meals in the dining room, cleaned the rooms, and did the laundry. Where the household and its attendant staff at Lake George required her own labor or hands-on involvement (complicated by Alfred’s advances toward Ilse), these services at the Shelton were provided more automatically, uniformly, so as to seem almost impersonal. (No need to concern yourself too deeply with the hands that cook, scrub, and starch!) This labor freed her from Alfred’s domestic burdens—if not his emotional burdens—as well as her own, freeing her to spend more time working. She was also growing increasingly accustomed to the relief from domesticity that money could buy. (From York Beach in 1928, she commented extensively about the “nice little [Filipino] boy” serving her breakfast, including the dehumanizing remark that he was “the sort of incredible creature that only a Schauffler [her friend’s surname] could find.”32)

It was the way she would design her settled life in New Mexico. The irony of Georgia describing herself as a “country”33 person and in the seemingly spare subsistence of her life between two homes there was the hired (and unpaid) labor it required. To abstract this truth employs the same blindspots so often brought to the consideration of “great” men and their accomplishments. Who does the perpetuation of Georgia’s isolation and self-reliance render invisible?

And, writes Alison Light of Virginia Woolf’s own household workers, “What if they had souls of one’s own?”34

Subscribe now

Notes & Updates

Hi. I realize today is the presidential election in the United States. Thanks for giving this any of your brain space when there are many more important things going on.

A bit of housekeeping: Given the sheer volume of words I’ve sent out so far (and the corresponding research effort an essay of this length requires), this newsletter will officially be bimonthly (rather than monthly). I doubt you’ll demand more!

I’ve also started using affiliate links through Bookshop.org wherever possible in my footnotes. This means that if you are compelled to purchase one of the many O’Keeffe biographies or letter collections or other books I reference through the Bookshop link in my references section, I will make 10% of the cover price. (If you are interested in reading an O’Keeffe biography but don’t know where to begin, I’d be happy to recommend one or a few based on what you’re most interested in.) If the books I reference are not available through Bookshop, I’ll link to ThriftBooks (but never Amazon).

Back in January! 〰️

In March, the Letters of Note Instagram posted an excerpt of a letter written by Georgia O’Keeffe in 1933: “I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.” And all summer, I came across these words—shared directly from the account, from other accounts, typeset in different fonts across different backgrounds. Today, the Letters of Note post has more than 18,000 likes.

The excerpt requires no context to understand, to feel, to relate to. And the post’s comments form a resounding chorus: Same. A few examples of comments: “An ode to seasonal depression,” “Waiting for HRT to kick in,” and “Is this real? Because, if so, I feel much better about myself.”

It’s real. And, of all the things you could show to the ghost of Georgia O’Keeffe—who died in 1986 at the age of 98, before computers and cell phones could summon the private musings of a dead woman to your fingertips—her literary meme-ification might be one of the most surprising (as fools, fascism, and plague in their many forms are hardly recent apparitions).

By the end of her life, Georgia certainly understood her celebrity and the power of possessing not only a public image but the means to influence it—working it carefully in her hands to shape it with the same intent and intensity as her art. Her work had found critical and financial success since the 1920s; and as she was establishing herself publicly with her painting, her likeness—including her nude body—had just as quickly been photographed, exhibited, and capitalized upon by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz (often lauded as one of the fathers of modern photography). In the wake of his death, she left New York and moved fully to New Mexico in 1949, where she would again be perennially photographed throughout the next four decades—by the likes of Ansel Adams, John Loengard, Bruce Weber, Tony Vaccaro, and Annie Leibovitz—but this time, in service of her own vision.

As exhibits like the Brooklyn Museum’s Living Modern in 2017 have more explicitly framed, Georgia participated in her own mythmaking.1 The Georgia O’Keeffe you know today, if you know (of) her, is at the very least descended from the identity she crafted for public consumption. Perhaps you have encountered one of these potted varieties: Georgia O’Keeffe, the self-reliant pioneer, the self-made woman, a “hard” and “straight shooter,” “angelic rattlesnake” of the high desert,2 master of modern simplicity in house and garment, form and function.

Subscribe now

The photographs helped, capturing the artist alone in her homes (as she owned two by 1945, one in the village of Abiquiú and one twelve miles north at Ghost Ranch), against seemingly empty landscapes, along the crests of sweeping hills and wide, open skies.

The photographs accompanied interviews and headlines: “Stark visions of a pioneer painter,” ran LIFE Magazine in its first edition of March 1968. It’s easy to imagine Joan Didion responding to this cover story, penning Georgia an “angelic rattlesnake,” in her eponymous 1976 essay on the artist, later published in The White Album.

Georgia was far warier of words than photographs—of images of all kinds, shapes, forms, and colors. As a visual artist, she’d had to acquiesce to some extent to a one-way dialogue, mostly from male critics, in response to her work. But she knew all too well that her life would become an archive as Alfred’s had. Alfred was a prolific photographer, patron, and collector as well as correspondent—penning dispatches as long as forty pages and saving thousands of the letters he received.3 (He and Georgia exchanged more than 25,000 pages of letters between themselves.) More than twenty years Georgia’s senior, he left behind a gargantuan legacy and estate to settle, which she herself did—uncomfortably, alongside his much much younger lover4—for a grueling three years after his death.

As the years waned, Georgia prepared for this inevitability, even suggesting the eventual publication of her correspondence, though requiring much of it remain sealed until 20 years after her death.5 In the last odd decade of her life, she also undertook rare, welcome projects that granted unprecedented access—but in her own words. Some Memories of Drawings, containing a selection of both art and written reflections, she published in 1974; in a similar vein, the far more extensive Georgia O’Keeffe was published in 1976. It was this latter edition that Didion responded to, quite directly, in her essay: Georgia, at 90, in her own words. And Georgia had a bone to pick, with words in particular. Georgia O’Keeffe opens:

“The meaning of a word—to me—is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words. I write this because such odd things have been done about me with words.”

Perry Miller Adato’s 1976 WNET documentary, Georgia O’Keeffe: Portrait of An Artist—the only video footage the artist ever allowed to be filmed—follows Georgia and her studio assistant, the ceramicist Juan Hamilton, preparing selected prints of her art for press.6 Here Juan delivers one of the funniest, bluntest characterizations of Georgia ever uttered: “She is one of the most lively, energetic human beings I have ever met and that I am sure I will ever meet—and sometimes I think, thank god.” As Georgia smiles knowingly for the camera, the intent of all this work seems clear: She was setting the record straight, however that line appeared to her in her mind’s eye.

Between the 1950s and 1980s, Georgia received a staggering volume of letters from fans—particularly white women, many of whom were housewives and regarded her as an idol, as a friend, as intimate and familiar. The actress Mildred Dorothy Dunnock, quoted in Linda M. Grasso’s sharp, fascinating analysis of these letters, wrote to Georgia: “The first painting I ever saw of yours was in my doctor’s office … [I]t’s there now, on the waiting room wall, a great blue flower, open, limitless, perfect. It is now part of me.”7

Throughout her lifetime, Georgia’s art had continuously been positioned—by her husband, by his circle, and by men who wrote about her work and dominated the critical conversation—as innately expressive of something inherent to women as a category. (Alfred had long championed individual white male artists while collecting and exhibiting white women’s art, art by children, and African art as examples, to his prejudiced mind, of “less intellectualized,” more “primiti[ve]” expressions. Georgia became the ultimate proxy. 8) The frequent, Freudian sexualization of Georgia’s flowers—specifically in her lifetime and by male critics—is an example of this positioning regurgitated by other men (and likely the reason she so pointedly refuted the interpretation). The critic Henry McBride, incredibly, then wrote of her 1926 exhibition: “I like her stuff … but I do not feel the occult element in them that all the ladies insist is there. There were more feminine shrieks and screams in the vicinity of O’Keeffe’s [sic] works this year than ever before.”9 (My brother in Christ, you put the occult element there!)

Perhaps Georgia’s reaction to her literary meme-ification as the mood of the summer would be the same as her response to her fan mail in 1977: “Why do all these people care about me?”10

In April, the artist Jason Garcia, also known as Okuu Pín, of the Santa Clara Pueblo posted another excerpted musing of Georgia’s to Instagram: “It is my private mountain … God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.”

The mountain, which Garcia addresses as Tsí Pín, is often referred to by its Spanish name: Cerro Pedernal, or Pedernal. Garcia asked his followers, via Instagram stories, for their thoughts and feelings in response to the statement, which he then posted over a clip from the Perry Miller Adato’s documentary. In it, Georgia’s emphasis (italicized below) is clear:

“When I got to New Mexico, that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I had never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly…”

She chuckles as the comments roll past her: “Ghost Ranch is built near my Pueblo—this quote dismisses all the bloodshed that happened,” “O’Keeffe whitewashing the New Mexican landscape. No one can own the land,” and “Manifest destiny much?”

These responses will be part of an exhibit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum this fall, TEWA NANGEH/TEWA COUNTRY, for which Garcia is gathering Tewa artists, scholars, and community members to “[question] the Tewa absence from this conception of the landscape and the broader settler colonial context of northern New Mexico.”11

Northern New Mexico has been violently misdescribed as “[Georgia’s] native land”—albeit in the broader consideration of New Mexico as the United States, but Georgia was native to neither—in writing published as recently as 2019.12 The use of “O’Keeffe Country” in reference to the area surrounding and including the village of Abiquiú persists even as the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has begun to actively discourage its use.13

This is the way the story ends: Georgia O’Keeffe, whose desire for a mountain, for a whole region, tried to swallow its history. But it’s only the end of her story.

Georgia O’Keeffe has been dead for nearly forty years, but her ghost lives on: Mona Lisa smile in a gaucho hat, mascot of “American” modernism, mid-century minimalism, rugged individualism, Western exceptionalism, manifest destiny, the New Woman14, women’s liberation, commodified third-wave feminism (think Queer Eye’s Anthony Porowski’s “Frida Georgia Yayoi Artemisia Louise” t-shirt15, think tote bags and enamel pins), queer community within the orbit of the Taos Society of Artists, girlbossery writ large, gentrification, colonialism, etc. That’s a lot of hats to wear, but as David Bowie’s Nikola Tesla delivers in The Prestige—a movie that deals in the science fiction of cloning and is in many ways about the psychological toll of maintaining many selves and the darker implications of desires at scale (Stay with me!)—“They are all your hats.”

They are all her hats—and some of them ours, maybe yours—to wear, to lift, to examine, even if only to hurl through the open window, to yell out, “ENOUGH of that woman!” There are living artists to support, to engage with; there are more urgent, worthier matters for our limited attention. And it is not everyone’s responsibility to deal with this artist’s sprawling legacy. Nor is it anyone’s specific duty beyond the self-implicated, but there are aspects in which you may be compelled or culpable—hats you may have donned—by virtue of interest or identity. Perhaps you have engaged with one of these emblematic Georgia O’Keeffes in your own art, writing, or reading. Perhaps you have one of her paintings in your home. Perhaps you have visited Ghost Ranch and wondered about the woman who haunts it.

There is the legacy and then there is the person. The Georgia O’Keeffe who in 1933 wrote the words that so many found relatable this summer—nearly a century later—had not yet realized this legacy. A person lives through time and helps build whatever legacy lives across it by their choices and what can be recorded (if time and others keep it). In 1933, Georgia owned no property in New Mexico and had not yet laid ludicrous claims upon a sacred mountain. She was living in New York, in an apartment in the city or at her husband’s family house in Lake George, visiting new friends in New Mexico, entangled in the joys and frictions of these relationships and in her more fraught marriage, reflecting frankly on the ups and downs of living and the challenges of creating. She could not yet command a semi-truck to Abiquiú to fetch a twenty-four foot painting from her garage (as she would upon completion of Sky above Clouds IV in 1965).16 In fact, that spring she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown—begetting another perennially viral slice of Georgia’s archive from 1933, a letter to the artist from none other than Frida Kahlo.17 But she was beginning to realize the critical and financial success she could one day hang so many hats upon. The year prior, she had completed the painting that in 2014 would shatter the all-time record for the highest-grossing sale of art by a woman artist, dead or alive, in a $44.4 million bid by Walmart heiress Alice Walton (Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, 1932).18 For heaven’s sake, she spent the aforementioned summer recuperating in Bermuda!

I didn’t always find this Georgia O’Keeffe—that is, the many Georgias before, or on the precipice of, becoming Georgia O’Keeffe—more interesting than the curated identity, but I do now. And there are many iterations: Georgia O’Keeffe, pre–New York. Georgia O’Keeffe, the commercial artist in Chicago. Georgia O’Keeffe, the teacher in South Carolina, in Texas. Like many people (particularly white women), I was instantly taken with the images of her living out her success in New Mexico, alone but seemingly never lonely, not questioning what or who the photos may have left out. (Georgia O’Keeffe, the millionaire multi-property owner complaining about taxes!)19 “How Georgia O’Keeffe left her cheating husband for a mountain,” ran The Telegraph in 2016, when I was a graduate student. (And the next year, I published my own piece of the kind of surface travel journalism that enables the lives of Georgia O’Keeffe and other white women to eclipse the true, lived history of a place.20) As a then-closeted queer woman, I was drawn to the histories of women who seemed to intentionally choose to remain alone in life. I was searching for, though I didn’t yet understand, histories of other queer women. (Having grown up evangelical, I ironically pored myself into the study of familiar queer isolation rather than search out or explore queer community.) Instead, I fell down the rabbit hole of Georgia O’Keeffe.

The more I read, the more and less interesting she became to me; all the more relatable (her crushes on new friends, struggles to exist in an often ill body and with anxiety and depression) as well as nauseating (her blatant colonialism as well as long-held fatphobia and unsurprising racial perspectives and blindspots21). And the more complicated my admiration became, the more culpable my continued study seemed in her overexposed legacy and her continued spotlight, to the point that I often considered hurling my own hat out the window altogether.

In a life spanning nearly a century, beginning on a dairy farm as one of seven siblings and ending on a pedestal of success—one that left behind a physical archive documenting nearly 70 years of artistic expression and intimate thought—there will be plenty to appreciate, inspire, repel, infuriate, and outright bore. I have no interest in adding more smoothed-over abstractions to the canon of Georgia O’Keeffe for the sake of anyone’s comfort, but I also do not consider any criticism I may levy an indictment of the art itself. (I’m uninterested and unqualified in making those claims!) Such a legacy, preserved, is simply too powerful a lens through which to examine how it came to be—how Georgia became Georgia O’Keeffe—and how some of us came to care so much.

It is in some ways a predictable story about the accumulation of wealth, power, and privilege. (And would she object to my telling it that way? Almost certainly!) But reading the archive of Georgia’s life and her legacy gives us a window into decades of history, culture, and influence—both in the years she lived and in the years her ghost has lived on since. And after nearly ten years of my own reading, research, and deconstruction, I find that I still cannot look away.

This is an invitation to look with me.

Subscribe now