Two Artists. Two Cities. Same Sky.

Robbi Firestone on Georgia O'Keeffe, New Mexico, and What a Student Never Stops Learning

Georgia O'Keeffe was one of the first women in New York City to live in a skyscraper.

She took an elevator eleven floors to her studio. Painted the skyline. Painted the sunset from above the New York street. Fierce. Visionary. Completely herself.

I learned this yesterday from Cody Hartley, Executive Director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. Standing in the Sheldon.

The Sheldon is one of O'Keeffe's most famous painted buildings. She lived there with her husband, Alfred Stieglitz. Now it houses university students, coincidentally.

But the walls remember.

Yesterday I was an invited guest at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's Founders and Funders event in my other home; New York City. A gathering of people who passionately believe that what O'Keeffe built matters. That it must continue.

I was honored to be in that room.

My apartment in New York City sits twenty-seven floors up.

I go to the roof at fifty floors to paint the skyline. The light shifting. The sky doing what skies do at that height, which is everything.

I am lucky. I know it.

O'Keeffe painted that sky eleven floors up. I paint it fifty floors up. Same sky. Her student. Always.

To dance between our two shared beloved homes, Santa Fe and New York City, is humbling. And everything.

What moves me most about O'Keeffe is not the flowers, though the flowers are extraordinary. It is her fierce sense of self. Her refusal to be categorized. Her insistence on vision over approval.

She left New York for New Mexico. Built a life in the desert on her own terms. Made some of the most important paintings of the twentieth century from a place most people had never heard of.

I know that sky too.

My landscapes and sky paintings are rooted in New Mexico, where I have worked for decades. Where my great great grandmother Cornelia Veronica Trujillo was born in the mid-nineteenth century. Where The Long Horizon opens July 18 at Gallery 215, 203 Fine Art, Taos.

Two artists. Two cities. The same sky.

I visit the Sheldon like a student comes to a teacher. Quietly. Attentively. Aware of what was made in those rooms by Georgia…..

She is my spirit animal. A secret admirer she will never know. Yet I carry her always. Her color. Line. Teachings. Passion. Ferocity. Imbued in my paintinga.

Ms. Georgia O’Keeffe’s cutting edge cleared a hell of a path for female artists….

The Long Horizon opens July 18 at Gallery 215, 203 Fine Art, 215 Ranchitos Road, Taos, New Mexico.

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum: okeeffemuseum.org