In one of the back galleries at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, a series of paintings depict Cerro Pedernal, a well-known mesa in northern New Mexico. Jason Garcia, of Santa Clara Pueblo or Kha’p’o Owingeh, has rendered Cerro Pedernal — “Flint Hill” in Spanish and Tsí Pín in Tewa— over and over again from the same vantage point. Some versions are minimal. Others are masterful plays on light and dark. At least two depict the mesa at night.
The repetition is an act of reclamation. García, whose Tewa name is Okuu Pín and who co-curated the exhibition, wants to have more of his depictions of Tsí Pín hanging in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum than the painter made in her own entire career. Right now, he has installed 19.
“Eventually, the entirety of the piece will be called ‘Our Private Mountain,’” he said referring to his plans to create and install over 30 depictions of Tsí Pín.
The project is part of a series of artworks on view in “Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country,” an exhibition that showcases 12 Indigenous Tewa artists, scholars and culture bearers alongside the paintings of O’Keeffe, whose ubiquitous depictions of the region are so strongly imprinted on the American imagination that they’ve come to function as stand-ins for northern New Mexico.
Throughout her career, O’Keeffe painted scores of Southwest scenes, animal bones, flowers, trees and buildings, but, of them, her sweeping landscapes have had the most staying power. And much like the landscape genre itself, her images were notably devoid of human presence, giving the impression that the region was empty and isolated. Her vision of this desert paradise has been boiled down to a single worn label: “O’Keeffe Country.” The reality, though, is that “Tewa people are still living on this land. We still have our ancestral place names for pretty much all of Tewa country,” Garcia said.
And, he added, “We’re still living within our four sacred mountains.”
Still, O’Keeffe’s depictions of New Mexico continue to dominate. In 1977, she spoke about Tsí Pín, which she simply called “the Pedernal,” in Newsweek, saying, “It’s my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me that if I painted it enough, I could have it.” This myopic viewpoint proved contagious, and now an entire region is popularly seen in relation to O’Keeffe’s work. In fact, in 2021, the New Mexico Tourism Department revived another one of the artist’s quotes for an advertising campaign. “When I got to New Mexico, that was mine,” a voice-over proclaims in a commercial depicting two women riding horses through the region’s sienna-hued bluffs.
The O’Keeffe Museum pushed back on its own namesake, however, issuing a statement that it did “not support the use of Georgia O’Keeffe quotes describing the New Mexico landscape as ‘her country’ or claiming ‘that was mine,’” it read. “While these quotes are from the artist, it is now clear that this is the language of possession, colonization, and erasure.”
The museum had been on a path of institutional self-reflection for some time and in 2020, it hosted a panel called “This is Not O’Keeffe Country,” which I moderated. Panelists included Corrine Sanchez, executive director of Tewa Women United; Christina Castro, founder of Three Sisters Collective, an Indigenous and Pueblo-women led collective based in Santa Fe; and Jason Garcia.
“While these quotes are from the artist, it is now clear that this is the language of possession, colonization, and erasure.”
Today, the “Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country” exhibition is one attempt to fill in the blind spots left by O’Keeffe’s dominating presence and the institutions that exploited her image and mystique with more expansive reflections of local Indigenous presence, reminding viewers that for all her notoriety, she was but one person in the long complex history of Tewa Nangeh.
This Land Carries Us, a gorgeous experimental documentary by Charine Pilar Gonzales, a 2024 Sundance Institute Native Lab Fellow and community-based filmmaker from San Ildefonso Pueblo, is one example. In the film, Gonzales’s gift for rich visual layering and stop-motion animation unfolds in a scene that opens onto a stand of trees sparkling with the orange leaves of fall and a setting sun. An array of Polaroid pictures of elders, children and ceramics is superimposed on the colorful landscape.
“The visuals of this film reaffirm what has always been true,” she wrote in an artist statement. “You cannot speak of Tewa land without also speaking of Tewa people.”
That sense of place is intimated in Coming Home, a mural that Eliza Naranjo-Morse, of Kha’p’o Owingeh, painted directly onto the gallery’s walls using clay she gathered from throughout the region, which shows the view northward through the badlands and mesas of Tewa Country that the artist saw whenever she drove home from Santa Fe. It inspired her to contemplate, as she writes in an artist statement, the “understated but significant acts that maintain relationship to land, preserve the Tewa language and the values of respect and reciprocity with all life.”
Other works speak to the kinds of perils that are uniquely specific to New Mexico — particularly the impacts of climate change and nuclear weapons. In Disaster #8 by Michael Namingha, Ohkay Owingeh and Hopi, a massive cloud of smoke hangs ominously above a mountain landscape. While the smoke originates from the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire of 2022, the largest in New Mexico history, it’s also suggestive of the mushroom clouds created by atomic blasts.
Namingha has deftly placed his work in conversation with O’Keeffe’s painting, Red with Yellow, from 1945, the year scientists detonated the world’s first atomic bomb in a stretch of New Mexico desert that the military had dismissed, erroneously, as unpopulated. Both artists use the same fiery color palette of acid oranges and reds, but in Namingha’s work, the colors represent the Air Quality Index chart.
Other works are direct critiques of O’Keeffe’s perceived ownership of the landscape. O’Keeffe even appears as a character in one of Garcia’s Tewa Tales of Suspense, a series of comic book-style clay tablets, each about the size of an iPad, painted with natural pigments gathered in the region and fired at his studio in Kha’p’o Owingeh. In the image, O’Keeffe stands against Tsí Pín, wearing her characteristic black wrap dress and matching black hat. A sign behind her says “Welcome to O’Keeffe Country,” but “O’Keeffe” has been scratched out and replaced with “TEWA.”
The show comes amid a broader battle of narratives about the past. Six years ago, the museum first began to evaluate O’Keeffe’s role in Indigenous erasure. Now, however, the national tenor has shifted increasingly rightward, including in the realm of images. Last summer, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted American Progress, John Gast’s infamous Manifest Destiny tableau, with a quote that echoed white nationalism: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”
Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has slashed federal funding for public art institutions that pursue diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. And Indigenous and minority-serving higher education programs, including at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, are also at risk of losing funding, according to the Trump administration’s proposed budget from April.
“We can and should do better and work from a place of care instead of violence, fear or racism,” said Bess Murphy, the O’Keeffe Museum’s Luce curator of art and social practice and co-curator with Garcia of the exhibition. She said that the 12 artists in the show participated in every step of its curation: choosing which O’Keeffe paintings would be included and writing their own exhibition text, which was then copyedited by Dr. Beverly Singer, an Indigenous anthropologist from Santa Clara Pueblo. A map delineating the six Tewa pueblos and featuring Tewa place names and ancestral villages was also a collaborative endeavor, said Garcia.
In this framework lies an argument for self-representation — artist and community-led exhibitions that offer nuanced and instructive dialogues about a region too long defined by outside eyes.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
