Georgia O'Keeffe: Not Just for Lesbians

When I was a freshman in college I went to see a therapist there who turned out to be a lesbian. How did I know she was a lesbian? Well, among other things, she had a giant Georgia O’Keeffe print of a flower in her office. Then, a close friend who is also a shrink suggested that I might not want to have a therapist that is a lesbian because my mom is a lesbian and I might need a safe space to complain about the lesbians in my life. Which, don’t we all? Like, even lesbians? The possible stifling effect hadn’t really occurred to me at first since the university counselor had almost nothing in common with my mom, except that my mom also had a pretty (vaginal) Georgia O’Keeffe print in her house. So the lessons I took from that experience were one, I should be wary of putting my mental health in the care of lesbians and two, lesbians love Georgia O’Keeffe like Donald Trump loves Ivanka (i.e. an amount that makes people uncomfortable).

Then, last summer I went to Santa Fe with my sisters. It was only a weekend visit and they really wanted to go to the Georgia O’Keeffe museum there but I kept convincing them that there were better things to do with our limited time since we all already know what vaginas look like. But on our last morning in Santa Fe, our flight was delayed and we had time to do one last thing so I finally relented on going to the Georgia O’Keeffe museum. What I learned is that vaginal paintings were only a small part of her repertoire and that she had originally painted a lot of New York-inspired stuff and then painted a lot of landscapes from her homes in Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch, which are about an hour away from Santa Fe. The desert paintings were stunning and I vowed to return someday so that I could see those places in person. Yesterday, I made good on that promise and I was not disappointed.

The whole time I’ve been in Taos, I’ve been sure to be dressed for a strenuous hike at any moment, since there’s ample opportunity around here. But I’ve mostly been overdressed; the first chance turned out to be mostly light sightseeing and at the second chance I was pathetically daunted by the amount of mud. So I’m not really sure why I wasn’t prepared to hike at Ghost Ranch. I guess I didn’t think it would be a thing one could do there given that the area is mostly sheer cliffs of crumbly looking sand and rocks.

But given the choice between going on tours where you have to stand in a herd of tourists and politely nod and try not to yawn or lean on historic things while straining to hear a guide give an in-depth explanation of the story behind why you’re not standing on the original floorboards of a four hundred year old dwelling and doing pretty much anything else in the world, including hard labor, I’d opt out of the tour. So when I got to Ghost Ranch yesterday and realized my choices were to pay forty dollars to have a guided group tour of the OUTSIDE of Georgia O’Keeffe’s house and going on a hike… alone… for free… to see for myself the very landscapes she painted, I opted for the latter (I want to note that there is some weird tension between the Ghost Ranch people and the Georgia O’Keeffe museum people where they have joint custody of the area and the Ghost Ranch people are like the one-weekend-a month-dad that you feel a little sorry for when they explain that they’re not allowed inside the old homestead).

Of course, I’ll never know what I missed on that tour but I’m fairly confident I made the right choice, even though it was a long hike straight uphill over rocky terrain in the midday sun and I was wearing skinny jeans, cotton granny panties (aka swamp-ass city), and socks that slip down every time I take a step. The views just kept getting more impressive the further I went up and with each plateau I reached, I was more motivated to get to the top and take the most amazing pictures I have ever taken in my life. After 45 minutes of laboring to breathe in the high altitude and constantly brushing sweaty hair off the back of my neck because I hadn’t even thought to bring a hair tie, I finally reached the top where there was just a short, flat walk out to the very edge of the rock formation. I giddily walked as fast as I could bring myself to walk when there’s a sheer drop hundreds of feet down on either side of the path and readied my phone to get my reward for all this effort; bitchin’ photos.

And there, right at the very edge, in the very best vantage point, was a person sitting in what looked like an a massive arm chair carved into the rock, facing out into the distance. I approached, assuming that my footsteps would alert this person that there was someone else who wanted to check out that spot. But there was no movement. At first, the long grey hair threw me and I thought it was a woman but when I got closer I realized it was a Native American man surveying the pristine beauty of his homeland, a perfect counterpoint to the Native American with a single tear rolling down his face in that littering PSA from the ‘70’s. Maybe even the very same one, but now he’s happy that the commercial worked!

I moved closer and gave a little “hey”. Still no movement. I dropped my metal water bottle on the ground and it landed on the rocks with a clank but still the figure did not turn around. I started to wonder if maybe it was some kind of art installation and I was too light-headed from the thin air to realize I was looking at a sculpture. Then, my phone dinged with a text message alert and I saw him flinch but not turn around. At this point, I realized that it was definitely a real human and this person was in some kind of meditative trance, looking out almost directly into the sun. On the one hand, I was a little sorry that my lame white tourist lady ass had clambered up there with all my noisy modern devices and ruined his solitude. But on the other hand, I was a little pissed that this dude was hogging the best spot in the whole place, just because it was his birthright or whatever. Like, here I was trying to psychically connect with that most feminine of painters and some man was blocking my view. Typical. I wonder if Georgia would have put up with this shit.