A Window into O’Keeffe’s Restless Renovations at Abiquiú

The salita door at Abiquiú, 2017.

In the Summer of 2019, I had a research fellowship at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was there to both start research for Through the Long Desert and to consult on a few specific aspects of the museum’s then in-progress conservation plan for O’Keeffe’s house at Abiquiú. One of these was the history of O’Keeffe’s windows, which were proving an intense conservation challenge as the artist had installed them with more attention to aesthetics and less to the structural difficulties of inserting sprawling picture windows into traditional adobe masonry. As is often the case with this kind of historical research, there was one mystery that proved particularly niggling, something that got under my skin and spawned hours of mostly fruitless archival research. It luck rather than skill that finally cracked it—I stumbled purely by chance across a slender receipt tucked in a miscellaneous folder at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. At least I was able to leverage my months of frustration into the story for Southwest Contemporary Magazine. A few months after that article came out, I received an interview request from the Window Research Institute in Japan. This was my first opportunity to write for an international audience, however niche. It was a welcome exercise to see the project through new eyes.

Perhaps ironically, this same window (and the view it frames) was part of what originally inspired Cody Hartley, Director of the O’Keeffe Museum, and Stuart Graff, then President and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, to muse on the connections between Wright and O’Keeffe. So even though this particular story didn’t make it into the book, Through the Long Desert might not exist if not for this vexing aperture in O’Keeffe’s living room.