I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me — so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.
— Georgia O’Keeffe
Sitting on a black leather couch, I watched a frail woman with a top knot pouring her heart out on the black/white screen. She lived in Ghost Ranch and painted flowers. Lots of them. Jimson weed. Lilac flowers. Calla lilies. Yellow flowers stuck in a teal teapot. Close-cropped flora portraits. Flowers magnified. Enlarged flowers that many interpreted as an abstraction of female genitalia. Flowers. And more flowers. It is flowers that I saw in Georgia O’Keffee Museum in Santa Fe (New Mexico). O’Keffee (1887-1986) knew flowers better than most. Santa Fe was her home for nearly decades. And the museum — the only one in the US solely dedicated to a female artist — celebrates the artist who was known as the Mother of American Modernism. It has 3,000 of O’Keeffe works, including 140 oil paintings, nearly 700 drawings, and hundreds of additional works dating from 1901 to 1984, the year failing eyesight forced her into retirement.
Flower power
In Santa Fe, one of the oldest cities in the US, flowers are easy to discern and interpret. Walking straight into a refrigerator can be a tad eerie. So can playing an invisible harp. Or ambling through a promenade flanked by naked neon trees. A garden with beating hearts. And a family that has ‘disappeared’ after ‘something happened’. In Meow Wolf, The House of Eternal Return, space, time and reality get absolutely addled.
Housed inside a former bowling alley (now owned by George RR Martin), the House of Eternal Return is a mishmash of 80 art installations by Meow Wolf art collaborative — the installations disparate from each other yet goading the visitor towards the non-linear narrative of the Silig family that ‘disappeared’. No one knows what happened, yet everyone tries desperately to decipher the fate of the Siligs.
Meow Wolf is phantasmagorical, but its escapism has found avid takers who walk in as the doors open and stay until the door shuts. Perhaps that’s a habit with George R R Martin, who has lived in Santa Fe since the 1970s, and is more known as the author of the book series that inspired HBO’s Game of Thrones. Even before the mind can shake off surrealism and spookiness of Meow Wolf, a giant iron spider and a mammoth humanoid robot stare menacingly from the parking lot. The green eyes of the tall coyote are equally frightening.
Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, has ‘The City Different’ as its tagline. There’s good reason for that. It has a 400-plus-year history, a multicultural legacy with Spanish, Native American and Anglo influences, its landscape dotted with adobe buildings, and houses the third-largest art market in the country. Canyon Road epitomises Santa Fe’s love for art. That one narrow half-a-mile street has nearly 100 galleries — the highest density of art galleries in the US.
The past of Santa Fe lives in New Mexico History Museum and Palace of the Governors. But I first had to see San Miguel Mission, the oldest church in the US, and the de Vargas Street House, which is often tagged as the oldest house in the US.
Inside the Palace of the Governors, the oldest continually used public building in the United States, are artefacts relating to different periods in Santa Fe’s history, from Spanish colonisation through gaining US statehood in 1912.
New Mexico History Museum also displays the satchel of writer D H Lawrence, who visited Santa Fe and wrote: “But the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend. In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new…”
Who’s the man?
Wherever you look, art abounds in Santa Fe. However, nothing matches the artistry of the unknown, unnamed, unidentified carpenter who built the miraculous staircase of Loretto Chapel. A 22-feet spruce staircase with no central pole, no newel, no discernible means of support that takes two full turns and rises into the attic loft. Legend has it the chapel was completed in 1878, but there was no staircase into the loft. The distressed Loretto nuns beseeched St Joseph — the patron saint of carpenters — to help with a solution for the chapel stairs.
On the ninth day of prayer, a carpenter arrived. He worked in private and completed the staircase. And when the happy nuns laid a banquet for him, he disappeared. He took no payment, left behind no name, and never returned. Santa Fe had never seen a more dexterous artist. The one who never held a paint brush. All he had was an axe and a few dowels!