8/24/2023 0 Comments Portable nuclear fallout shelterbut I’m very busy inside,” O’Keeffe says in a video that plays on loop in her eponymous museum in Santa Fe. Perhaps this is why the artist was a bundle of nerves. She lived through the Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, and much of the Cold War. A teacher at the beginning of World War I, she would tell her biographers in her later years about how traumatized she was to think of her students being sent away to fight. O’Keeffe was born in 1887 into a fraught postbellum America. While her reputation for being poised, self-possessed, and unafraid dominated her art-world narrative, she was open about her anxiety. So, I decided to make the pilgrimage some 60 miles north of Santa Fe to the village of Abiquiú to see it for myself. None of her thoughts, motives, or plans-just brief, scant mentions in decades of literature, and one black-and-white thumbnail of a nondescript door in the dirt. Inside O’Keeffe’s spartan bunker, I see myself.īut, there is virtually nothing online about what she built available for my reading. We love art that is beautiful, but we crave art that is relatable in O’Keeffe’s renderings of natural objects and undulating pastel landscapes, viewers see timelessness, sensuality, and the eerie power of the natural world. The door is tucked into a bluff facing the edge of the artist’s four-acre property in the painted deserts of northern New Mexico.Īs my own apocalyptic anxiety continues to tick upward, I find some grounding comfort in its existence: this world-famous painter of petals and bones, in her Ferragamo flats and wrap dress, who wasn’t known at all for being apocalyptic, spent the early 1960s casually and quietly fortifying her home for the end of the world. Georgia O’Keeffe’s fallout shelter is a subterranean chamber of white cinder blocks, comparable in size and charm to the interior of a cargo van.
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