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Moments in Time, Photographs by Maria Chabot

February 6 - June 1, 2004

 

Maria Chabot met Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico in 1940, when Chabot was 26 and an aspiring writer; and O'Keeffe was 53 and one of America's most important artists. From 1941 to 1944, Chabot spent summers with O'Keeffe at the artist's Ghost Ranch house, and from 1946 to 1949, Chabot oversaw the restoration of the ruined adobe house that O'Keeffe purchased in the village of Abiquiu. The women wrote frequently during the winter and early spring, when O'Keeffe was with Alfred Stieglitz in New York and Chabot was with her family in San Antonio. When they were together in New Mexico, Chabot took numerous photographs of O'Keeffe, her Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu houses, her paintings, and their camping/painting trips. (right: Maria Chabot, Georgia O'Keeffe Writing Daily Letter to Alfred Stieglitz, Ghost Ranch House Patio, 1944, © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum)

Maria Chabot believed that her letters and photographs were important historically, and by the early 1980s envisioned publishing them. Although she made significant progress over the years, the project was far from finished at the time of her death in 2001, when she bequeathed her literary estate to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center. Under the auspices of the Research Center, editors Barbara Buhler Lynes, who is The Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Research Center, and Ann Paden, who worked for Chabot on the project from 1999-2001, were able to realize Chabot's dream by finishing the book, which has been copublished by the Research Center and the University of New Mexico Press: Maria Chabot/Georgia O'Keeffe: Correspondence, 1941-1949.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum will exhibit letters and photographs from this publication in an exhibition that opens February 6, 2004 and will be on view through June 1, 2004 titled: Moments in Time, Photographs by Maria Chabot. Curator, Barbara Buhler Lynes, has included 40 of the 60 photos reproduced in the book as well as a small selection of the book's nearly 700 letters. left: Maria Chabot, Georgia O'Keeffe Hitching a Ride to Abiquiu, Ghost Ranch, 1944, © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum)

According to Lynes, "The exhibition's never-before-seen-images provide fascinating glimpses into the day-to-day lives of these two strong and independent women and of their camping trips to a place 150 miles west of Abiquiu that O'Keeffe called the Black Place." It also includes Chabot's photographs of O'Keeffe's house in Abiquiu, which provide the only visual record of how the house looked as a ruin in 1945, but also of the various remarkable stages of its restoration. In addition, the exhibition presents photographs by other photographers who were friends with both women, such as Ansel Adams, John Candelario, Laura Gilpin, and Eliot Porter.

As Lynes points out: "This important exhibition makes it possible for visitors to experience, in a rather intimate way, many of the moments that Chabot and O'Keeffe shared during the years they were together in Northern New Mexico."

 

 

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Read more articles and essays concerning this institutional source by visiting the sub-index page for the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Resource Library.

For further biographical information on selected artists cited in this article please see America's Distinguished Artists, a national registry of historic artists.

rev. 9/10/10, 12/10/10, 12/16/10

Search for more articles and essays on American art in Resource Library. See America's Distinguished Artists for biographical information on historic artists.

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