Who owns Pedernal?

I took some time off work this past week -- a staycation that mostly involved cleaning the house, which I hadn't done in far too long. But I also visited the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum to tour an exhbit that I've been meaning to get to since last fall: Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country. The museum worked with several Pueblo artists, whose ancestors have been here in New Mexico for thousands of years, to provide works that intersect with O'Keeffe's work.

The painting that the museum has been featuring in its advertising for the exhibit is one by Michael Namingha (Ohkay Owingeh, Hopi) that riffs on one of O'Keeffe's pelvis paintings. O'Keeffe used the hole in pelvis bones as a frame, usually to view the sky (I have a poster of one where she painted the moon framed in this way). But she also painted one where the bone is red and the sky is yellow. Namingha takes this colorway for his Disaster #8, converts it to values from the Air Quality Index, and uses it to depict a mushroom cloud rising above the 2022 Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire.

It's striking, and it speaks to climate change. But a more prevalent message was the Pueblo artists' reactions to O'Keeffe's love of Cerro Pedernal, the mesa she painted almost 30 times over her years in New Mexico. Here's a work from Marita Swazo Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo) that doesn't look like much: a pot, broken pottery pieces, and some brown dirt: 

Photo: Lynne Cantwell 2026

It's called Did Georgia Pray? The exhibit card explains the significance of the work:

Photo: Lynne Cantwell 2026

Hopefully you can click on the photo to make it big enough to read. The artist talks about how she produces her work in a sacred manner, praying for the land at each step of the way. She wonders whether O'Keeffe did the same. And about Pedernal, she says: 

Georgia once said, "It's my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it."

But this is Tewa Nangeh -- our land! We do not own it. We pray for it. 

So, I ask again: Did Georgia pray?

Did O'Keeffe hold the land sacred, or was she a clueless white person? Some of the artists in the exhibit make the point that O'Keeffe almost never paints people; as a sort of proto-Modernist, shapes and contrasts were her jam. But these Puebloans wonder whether leaving people out of her art diminishes the importance of their people and themselves -- to the point of erasure.

It's not like white folks haven't been trying for more than a century to erase Indigenous folks from the West.

It gave me a lot to think about.

*** 

Speaking of prayers, though, my favorite piece is this one by Elisa Naranjo Morse (Kha'p'o Owingeh, aka Santa Clara Pueblo), called A Prayer Making Its Way. 

Photo: Lynne Cantwell 2026

That's a badger, one of the six directional guardians of Pueblo spirituality. I hesitate to say much more because I couldn't find info specific to Kha'p'o Owingeh spirituality on the internet (and that's probably by design). I did find a fair amount of info on the Zuni guardian animals because that pueblo sells figurines of them as artworks, and it's possible that Kha'p'o Owingeh beliefs are similar. 

With that disclaimer out of the way: For the Zuni, there are six sacred directions: east, south, west, north, the earth deep below us and the sky above us. The badger is their guardian of the south; he is known as a healer, but can also be tenacious and aggressive.

I liked this one for the colors. But now that I'm looking at it again, I see that Badger is carrying the prayers of his people away from a disaster. I'm sure it's no accident that this is hanging close to Namingha's Air Quality Index-coded mushroom cloud and right across from Hinds's pottery.

That I didn't understand all that to start with might put me in the same clueless-white-person category as O'Keeffe. But I hope not.

The exhibit runs through November 1, 2026.

***

Some of y'all may be wondering about Zuni Pueblo's guardian animals. Here you go, from a shop here in Santa Fe that sells fetishes:

• East is the white wolf;
• South is the badger, as I said above; 
• West is the blue bear;
• North is the mountain lion;
• under the Earth is the black mole; and
• the sky above is the eagle.

And the people of the pueblo are at the center.

***

These moments of thought-provoking blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!