K. Boles: Okay.
Hello everyone.
Thank you very much, Debbie.
And I'm really excited to be here.
I really enjoyed learning from all of the
wonderful experts that are here so far in
the conference and I'm excited to share a
little bit about my ongoing work with … as
the 2019-2020 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Cultural
Landscape fellow and it will come up soon.
Yes.
Okay.
In this photo here, this is a view from Georgia
O'Keeffe's Abiquiú property looking North
and you can see the Rio Chama delineated by
the cottonwoods in the fall, and this view
is part of an important view shed from her
property and it's specifically from her studio,
her painting studio and also from her bedroom
and you can see it also from the driveway.
Great.
I'm going to skip over this because by now
we all have talked about that a lot.
Great.
This project that I'm working on is part of
a three-year project that was a partnership
between the University of New Mexico School
of Architecture and Planning, Historic Preservation
and Regionalism program and the Georgia O'Keeffe
Museum and the National Park Service, National
Historic Landmark program.
Thank you Skylar and Astron.
They're going to be presenting after me and
part of the funding is coming from the NHL
program, the other funding is coming directly
from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and that's
just the funding for this one year of the
project.
This is a three-year project and the product
would be, hopefully, a series of cultural
landscape studies to guide the museum's management
of the properties.
In year one, we're focusing on the Abiquiú
property and in the following years it will
follow the same format, but we'd focus on
someone else, a different fellow, would focus
on the Ghost Ranch Property and then the larger
Northern New Mexico areas that were important
influences for O'Keeffe's artwork and lifestyle.
In year one, we started in the Summer of 2019
in August with a one-week Summer class taught
by my supervisor for the project, Julian McGilvery.
Thank you, Julie and Francisco [Uvina 00:02:38],
he's with the UNM HPR program and then after
the Summer class, which was a multidisciplinary
and undergrad and graduate students, one-week
intensive fieldwork-based summer class.
After that, I was selected as the fellow,
following the academic year, the 2019-2020
academic year working on this one property.
Looking at each of the years in a little bit
more detail here.
This is the Abiquiú property.
O'Keefe's property is right here and it's
basically a new design building that's a combination
of modern and vernacular building traditions
and it's partially reusing a former Spanish
colonial courtyard house ruin as the footprint
and some of the material actually as well
and it sits on a steep slope right here bounded
by two arroyos, which are dissolve ways for
a larger Sekiya irrigation system near Abiquiú
Plaza coming from a creek up high.
The slope overlooks Rio Chama Farmland that
is a Sekiya irrigated off of the Rio Chama.
And in addition to the house being a ruin
before O'Keeffe purchased the property, there
was a garden right here that existed on the
site as well and that was one of the reasons
that O'Keefe was really interested in purchasing
this property.
And when we go to the next slide, you can
see why because this is the property that
she owned, this is the Ghost Ranch Property
right here, which is in a ... she owned this
before the Abiquiú property and it's in a
very remote and dry area where there is no
Sekiya irrigation system and no garden, no
opportunity to have a garden here.
She had her food brought in and with the increased
pressure, her own preference and also the
increased pressure of war rationing led to
kind of desiring have another property and
then purchasing the Abiquiú property within
five years of purchasing this property and
they're very, very close to each other as
we'll see on this next slide.
There is Abiquiú, there's Ghost Ranch.
Very close.
Yes.
This would be the topics for the third year,
potentially looking at maybe two sites, the
white place and the black place that O'Keeffe
had lots of paintings of, as well as in addition
to the two places that she lived for the majority
of her of her time in New Mexico.
Also in Santa Fe where she lived for the last
two years of her life and purchased another
property there and Taos where she came in
like 1929 I think that's the right year.
Yes.
And stayed with Mabel Dodge Luhan there.
And these are just places within Northern
New Mexico.
There is many more cultural landscapes of
O'Keeffe's entire life that could be studied.
She lived in quite a few different places,
but this is just within New Mexico.
UNMs pedagogical goals could really be satisfied
looking at a number of landscapes in New Mexico,
there's definitely lots of wonderful places
to study.
However, maybe like why are we looking at
Georgia O'Keeffe's properties and this is
kind of like a happy marriage of circumstance
to a degree.
There's practical things like timing and the
museum's demonstrated need for needing cultural
landscape studies.
They have ongoing HSR projects and conservation
reports so this really fits in well with their
current studies of the property and would
help augment that and is really needed.
There's also funding that's available that's
very helpful as well and the fact that there's
multiple properties so it can be studied with
over a series of years and looking at a much
larger, they kind of combined to form a larger
landscape.
And also the Abiquiú property itself is a
national historic landmark due to its high
integrity and its association with O'Keeffe
and O'Keeffe is really important for the critical
role in development of American modernism
and the fact that she was a woman artist in
a time when there were very few well known
women artists and she's also become an American
icon and mythic figure.
Those three reasons, in addition to the fact
that O'Keefe was very connected to the land
and the landscape was very inspirational to
her artwork and her personal life.
As you can see in this, this top image is
one of O'Keeffe's paintings and this bottom
image is a photo that I took on the site.
This is a very similar view standing in a
similar location that the first initial slide
was taken but looking off to a little bit
to the East and you can see that even though
the painting is considered abstract, there's
definitely elements of realism with like the
profile of the mountains and all this and
all this other stuff as well.
This is a similar view to what she could have
seen out of her bedroom window.
[Coughs] Excuse me.
The year one, like I said, we started with
the one-week summer class and the fellowship
has really broken down into two different
parts.
Last fall I was looking at doing a lot of
historic research and field research, like
archival research and field research and then
now in the spring I am grappling with trying
to write this all up in a report and coming
up with treatment recommendations, which I'm
sure Julie will be very, very helpful with.
And then I will turn in a draft form in May
and Julie will help finalize it and it will
be due in August.
This is a picture of the summer class, a bunch
of us students, it was really exciting because
we got to take the cover off of the old well
and look down there and you could see the
water table in which direction the water was
flowing and how deep it was and this was matching
up with different descriptions of the well
from when Chabot was looking at the property
and O'Keefe was looking at the property so
it was pretty neat to see that on the site.
I'm going to talk about the research process
that I really use so far in documenting this
property or trying to document this property
and I'll walk through these steps here.
Again, this is a recent aerial photo so it's
looking straight down Google.
There is the main house and there's the studio
building.
North is up on this.
The previous, the first image was taken like
from here looking out so the Rio is over there
and then that second artwork image was taken
kind of looking that way at a little Mesa
over there.
There's two arroyos on either side of the
property and then a few other key things to
point out; there's a really steep slope here,
a bomb shelter that she added to the property.
This is a mainly cactus area that's managed
just to kind of keep the cactus down.
There's an old corral here and pig pen that
used to be that; this used to be a barn that's
now the studio.
This is a motor court driveway, main vegetable
garden over here, orchard terrace area and
service road.
When looking at this project it's where to
start and we'll try to start at the beginning
looking at cultural and physical history of
the larger region and this area has a really
long and rich history as we all know well
before O'Keeffe.
In particular in 1754 there's was Spanish
colonial land grant of Santo Tomás de Abiquiú
to the [inaudible 00:11:40], which are detribalized
native Americans and before that the site
was occupied on and off by American Indians
since at least 9,000 BC.
Of note, we think that the original structure
house on the site may have dated to 1744 which
is 10 years before ... oh, you're right it
did freak me out, the actual land grant took
place.
How to study all this.
That was a little tricky and it came down
to really good collaboration with other experts,
specifically local historians and archeologists
making use of really good tools like the Web
of Soil Survey and historic aerial images
and things like that.
The conservation team installed a weather
station on the site and is collecting climate
data.
Just as a little side note with the aerial
vegetation, when I was doing my MLA, I worked
for a PhD student who was trying to survey
the vegetation in the Arctic over really large
areas, so he used high resolution aerial imagery
and had a whole grid of data points in GIS,
and my job was to go and spend hours IDing
plant species at every single grid point and
this high resolution aerial image.
It's actually, it's really interesting what
you can do with just IDing stuff off of aerials.
Although the ones we're using for this project
are a little blurry unfortunately.
A great thing was as I mentioned, working
with a local archeologist, I got to talk with
him kind of like an informal interview and
that saved me a ton of time and it was fascinating,
because he actually gave me a whole list of
books and journal articles and resources to
just go read.
He'd already done all the research and just
said, "Look at all this stuff."
He also pointed out sources that were incredibly
difficult to find.
I probably never would have found them on
my own.
It was from like a public library in Minnesota
and it had no label associating it with O'Keeffe.
It was mislabeled there were images.
It's kind of amazing what can be found with
the partnerships that you can make and he
also told me about really good other people
to interview and work with.
That was really helpful.
Also, for this particular project, we're looking
at geologic time.
Going back and this is important because of
Georgia O'Keefe's artwork, you'll see layers
of rock and they're different colors and you
see the strata and that kind of stuff so it's
kind of interesting to make those pairings
between an artist perspective and then this
large geologic time reference as you can see
here.
This is the White Place, which is one of the
places that O'Keefe like to paint and it's
actually just north of the property just across
the river there and it's made out of volcanic
ash, tufa, different ways to say it so has
these really unique forms.
In addition to looking at the regional context,
it's really important to look at prior studies
that have already been done on the site.
One thing that's important is since this is
a national historic landmark with association
to Georgia O'Keeffe, is learning about Georgia
O'Keeffe and there's tons and tons of material
out there so I look to the museum staff to
help point me to the best resources.
Again, making use of a network of connections
to try to target, hone in on things that'll
actually be helpful.
A great deal of research has already been
done about this property and is currently
ongoing with the property as well, as you
can see here.
There's a NHL nomination, there's HABS, there's
two HSRs, structural analysis report, geo-tech
boundary and topo surveys, thank goodness
and there's concurrent studies including another
HSR.
There's an architectural conservation report.
There's other fellows that are studying various
topics including like bones and rocks and
cool stuff, and there's also this internship
program that the museum has started that deals
with growing vegetables in O'Keeffe's garden.
In addition to that, the museum has the original
research materials from the National Historic
Landmark nomination and a bunch of material
when they were doing deed research.
Lots of material on that, the primary sources
in their archives.
Because the cultural landscape studies exist
with a prior, concurrent and future reports
and they are living documents, it's really
important to have strategies to compile and
organize all of this research, especially
research that's going on concurrent with current
studies.
I think maybe you all know, you would know
way better than me if there's like a really
great tool online platform for researchers
to share in real time with each other to update,
it's like Airtable or Google Docs, something
like that but I was thinking like specifically
for chronologies and for like a database of
primary source quotes that would only be used
internally but everybody can keep adding to
it and the museum can keep it.
Stuff like that came up during this project,
that'd be useful to have for us specifically.
This is looking at one of the projects as
currently ongoing.
The house is adobe but it was stuccoed over
with cementitious stucco, it was O'Keeffe's
decision to do that during her lifetime.
It currently has cementitious stucco; however,
it's been an ongoing question about whether
to take it off or not and so a portion of
that was removed in 2014 by the museum and
re-plastered with mud.
However, it proved much too difficult for
them to maintain with their current maintenance
staff and so that's why there's this plastic
over it because it's protecting the adobes
from further deterioration and it will be
re-stuccoed over with cementitious stucco.
Another example of changes that are currently
ongoing on the property.
This is the vegetable garden from last summer
that the internship program planted and took
care of and harvested and cooked a wonderful
meal from but it's different every year.
While it's still a vegetable garden in the
same location that O'Keefe had her vegetable
garden, it's still very different.
It's interesting how to document that change
in practices.
After you've looked at the regional context
and prior research, you can finally start
on this site specific, archival research,
and this is something that I wish I had started
earlier in the project.
I spent a little bit too much time on the
regional context because it's fascinating
and really complex but there's a ton of archival
material for this particular project.
For most people that have a ton of, I'm sure
most people in the audience have a ton of
research experience and this is maybe not
helpful for ... If there's anyone out there
that's just starting, these are some potential
resources that might be helpful.
And then for this project, I was really fortunate
that the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research
Center S. Engl Family Foundation Library and
Archive has a really large archival collection.
Specifically what was really helpful was correspondence,
so I spent a lot of time reading the actual
letters that Georgia O'Keeffe wrote to others
and that other people wrote to her, which
then you get in her own words or whoever's
words, different quotes in the particular
time period about potentially the garden or
the property and there was quite a bit of
discussion about design decisions during construction
and some information about O'Keeffe's continued
alterations to the property.
Historic aerials and photographs were really
helpful.
If they're too dark or too light, I could
alter them in Photoshop to try to make things
a little bit more legible.
That was a helpful tool.
However, not all of the archival material
exists just at the museum resource center.
There's actually quite a bit at the Yale Beinecke
Rare Book & Manuscript Collection, as Claire
knows.
Some of that is sealed and therefore inaccessible
for a certain amount of time after death.
Each one is sealed for a different period
of time so that makes it a little bit tricky
and then also the museum is still actively
accessioning materials to their collection,
some of which were added during the scope
of this project, so you just have to kind
of be aware of that and keep looking for things.
The staff was great about telling me when
new things were coming in and letting me see
them and that kind of stuff and trying to
help me work through when finding aids weren't
really available.
One of the main difficulties was really reviewing
a large quantity material in a short period
of time.
I'm sure everyone has different tools.
Like I talked about was asking different people
who are knowledgeable and getting targeted
answers and then you know if it's digitized,
being able to do like a keyword search, learning
how to skim and when I was reading the letters
I was finding there was like patterns in the
way different people would write about things.
You might find they're talking about, if they're
talking about their family, the garden is
not really going to be in that paragraph so
you can kind of skip through it and then just
look for a garden topics or something like
that.
It's really important to go back and forth
between archival research and field research
and it really is back and forth.
You can't just do one first and then go to
the other one.
For this project, an example of that is, so
this is the studio building.
This is facing north and north is this way.
That's her bedroom and the studio.
This is the bomb shelter here, overgrown by
cactus and there's actually, what you're not
seeing is a path and steps underneath here,
which I was made aware of when I saw a 1979
aerial photograph.
You could see the path and you could see the
steps on that.
It keyed me into, hey, there's something here
I should probably go look at that.
Another example where these flagstone paths,
which again looking at that same aerial helped
me find them and then I went there and kind
of dug in the dirt and moved the leaves around
and was able to find them.
It's really helpful to have a survey and unfortunately
a lot of the information that's currently
surveyed, it doesn't include everything that
we want to include so here's a list of the
features that I added by hand using a tape
measure and also using a Trimble sub-meter
GPS unit and this is just a screenshot showing
my CAD file where I keep all the information.
It brought the survey in.
I geo referenced an aerial photograph that
was actually taken from an airplane so it
was definitely, it was on an angle.
It's kind of tricky to ... It's not a perfect
geo-reference but I just wanted to get it
enough to be able to underlay it and then
I traced different features from the aerial,
the blue are tree spreads that I traced from
underlaying the 1996 HABS drawing and I'm
comparing that to the green, which is all
of the tree spreads that I measured by hand.
Some of the really interesting things that
aren't on the survey or the trash cans were
O'Keefe burned her paintings that she didn't
want.
There's gravestones from where she buried
her dogs and she had rock collection displays
on tree stumps and things like that around
the landscape.
Also found again on the aerial, an area of
a squash patch that didn't know about before,
showed places where firewood was stored and
a lot of other interesting uses of the landscape.
Really, really important was discussion with
the site managers.
I can't really express how important this
is for me on this project.
As Abiquiú property has been continuously
cared for in part by members from one of the
local families and shortly after O'Keefe brought
the property in 1945, their accumulated knowledge
creates a rich and invaluable legacy of management
traditions.
There's three siblings that work directly
for O'Keeffe during her lifetime to care for
the property and they currently care for the
property.
Their mother was her cook, one of her cooks
and their grandfather was her gardener and
they really intimately know this property
and have a lot of stories about life with
O'Keefe.
Like one of them helped her paint when she
was losing her eyesight and would burn her
paintings that she didn't want.
One of them cares for the landscape and knows
he can walk around and say for every single
thing that was planted, when it was planted
and how it's been cared for, if it was replaced,
where it was replaced from, where he got the
material from, all that information.
It's really great and what I'm showing here
in this photo is a practice of management
in the Fall where they burned some of the
vegetation and that's something I never would
have known about if I hadn't talked to them.
My strategy for that, I really liked them.
They're wonderful people and there was a formal
oral history done but this was just really
informal and just kind of hanging out and
talking and learning and just listening what
they felt was important to share about the
landscape and letting that kind of guide the
conversation.
And the next steps are basically formalizing
the report, like I mentioned before, proposing
treatment and then organizing all this material
for whoever comes next.
Okay.
Any questions?
Speaker 2: Really great introduction.
I have a very odd multidisciplinary history,
which I've cultivated over a long time because
those were my interests really lie in architectural
landscape, architecture, ecology and historic
preservation and when I was working for an
architecture firm, I got to work on several
HSRs in Santa Fe and then I got to take the
summer class while I'm at UNM because I've
had my eyes opened, historic preservation
kind of looking for cool opportunities and
through that was exposed to this opportunity
with a great support from Julie.
Audience: To what extent are Georgia O'Keefe's
paintings themselves important in prioritizing
[inaudible 00:27:17]?
Katherine B.: Incredibly important.
Yes.
And that it will be part of the project.
That work has already been done to a degree
and the paintings are all cataloged in a book
and so we will match up different ones for
the property.
Yes.
Audience: Say something about the objectives
that the museum [inaudible 00:00:27:42], has
with the treatment plan.
Katherine B.: I think this would, and Julia
might help me speak to this a little bit,
I don't know, but although there's been a
lot of studies on the building itself, this
is really to my knowledge, the first study
looking at the entire property, a complex
study looking at it and I think anything we
can give them will be helpful.
Julie, do you want to take on the treatment
one?
Julie: I visited with the staff of the museum
and this was probably three years ago now,
and they discussed their projects in the future
and then they said we have all these issues
with a landscape and we don't know anything
about its evolution except they know tons
about its evolution but it's not put together,
and so that was the conversation we had.
I was like a believer, you actually know what's
happened here and you know what's here, but
things were all in all these different spots.
So I viewed it as an organizational effort
and then the treatment is a big discussion
because we're having some issues between conservation
recommendations from the conservation plan,
the HSR to the cultural landscapes so since
all of that's happening all at once, now we're
having a dialogue and there's lots of things
that keep popping up that are in a little
bit of conflict with each other but we can
work through it.
Everything's kind of coming together nicely
for this house I think but yeah, they know
a great deal.
It's just they didn't know about cultural
landscapes.
It goes back to that and when we had the discussion
of what a cultural landscape is, then they
were like, we want to do that and they have
all the information.
Yeah.
Kate's been wonderful talking with them and
putting that together and making all that
really work.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Audience: Do we have time, real quick.
You’ve got a whole lot of interpretive possibilities
there that you've got nuance stuff in a landscape
and the artist herself was very nuance.
Are you planning on using this not just for
treating the property but for interpreting
[inaudible 00:00:30:07], there?
K. Boles: Yeah, I can't speak for the museum
on that, but I do know that they have a whole
team that focuses on interpretation and I
do believe that would be a really important
part of this project.
They are always coming up with new interpretive
objectives and hopefully this report would
be, I could see it as being incredibly valuable
for that.
Thank you very much.
