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.

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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.

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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.

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

What you wrote and what readers think you wrote.

When writers gather, one of the perennial topics of discussion is the comments readers make about our work. Sometimes readers understand exactly what we meant when we wrote the thing we wrote; other times, not so much. 

I've seen this in action when I've attended Q&A sessions with various authors. Someone -- often a fan -- will suggest connections between this scene and that, or similarities and/or differences between or among certain characters -- and the author will say something along the lines of, "Hmm. That's interesting. I never thought about that before."

Of course, sometimes authors run across people whose interpretations of their work are so far out in left field that you have to wonder whether they read the book at all.

Be that as it may, this phenomenon of readers reinterpreting authorial intent really bugs some authors -- particularly when it results in a fewer-than-five-star review on Amazon. The thing is, though, there's no point in getting upset about it. Once the author has written the words and put them out there for the world to read, his or her part is done. The rest is up to readers -- who, by reading the author's words, bring the story to life anew. And readers always bring their own life experiences and biases to the work. So it stands to reason that they may see things the author didn't put there consciously -- or things the author never put there at all.

It's not just a bane of writers; all sorts of creative types have this experience. This past week, I was on vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I paid another visit to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. O'Keeffe's work has been misinterpreted from the get-go; her paintings of close-ups of flowers, for example, were viewed by the men of the art world as abstract depictions of female genitalia. O'Keeffe hated that. She was interested in the shapes -- the lines and curves -- so she painted them. It had nothing to do with sex at all. 

Later in life, O'Keeffe traveled around the world -- to Japan and to Machu Picchu, among other places -- and she would paint the things she saw in her travels. Which brings us to this painting. It's called Tan, Orange, Yellow, Lavender, and it was first displayed at a New York gallery in 1961, when O'Keeffe was 74 years old. 

At the O'Keeffe Museum, a card on the wall explains that the dealer who owned the gallery thought it was a painting of a tree. It's not. It's a system of rivers O'Keeffe saw from the window of a plane. But she didn't correct the dealer: "As for me," she said, "they were just shapes."

What we as authors put on paper are also "just shapes." If we're lucky, our readers will see the same shapes we meant to put there. But not always. And that's okay. Really.

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These moments of interpretive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Behind the brown door.

I had every intention of writing a blog post last weekend while I was away, but time got away from me as I visited with friends, and I forgot to even put up the "on vacation" sign. I'm pretty sure it's the first time I've completely missed a week in the five years (five years!) I've been doing this blog. Still -- sorry about that. I hope I can make it up to you with this week's post, which is about Georgia O'Keeffe.

O'Keeffe is probably my favorite painter. I can take or leave her flower paintings -- which, by the way, she never meant to be sexual. "I hate flowers," she's quoted as saying. "I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move." The art world pinned the "girl painting girl parts" label on her because her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, had used her as a nude model for his photography.

My favorite O'Keeffe works are those she painted after she discovered New Mexico: the bones, the amazing landscapes, and this one window. I loved the window painting so much when I saw it at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe that I bought a print and framed it. It's called In the Patio II and she painted it in 1948.

That wall fascinated O'Keeffe. She painted and sketched it at least twenty times. It's the reason she spent more than ten years convincing the Archdiocese of Santa Fe to sell her the crumbling ranch house with the patio -- a courtyard, really -- in the center.

The wall fascinated me, too. I wanted to know what was on the other side of the window. I was sure it was something magical.

But when I took a tour of her house and studio in Abiquiu, NM, this past week, I discovered it's not a window at all. It's a door. Here's a link to what the real thing looks like. I'm resorting to a link so that I don't violate any copyrights -- but I encourage you to click through so you can see what I'm talking about. In the photo at the link, see how the shadow of the adjoining wall slants across the wall with the door? Well, when I was there, the wall with the door was itself casting the shadow. Adobe is the same color as the dirt in the courtyard. And O'Keeffe was a Minimalist; she left out details to get at the essence of what she was painting. So for In the Patio II, she left out the line where the wall ends and the patio starts. The dark stripe under the door is the shadow of the wall; the brighter stripe beyond is sunlit dirt.

So what's behind the door? It's a storage room, according to our guide. O'Keeffe hated clutter. She kept all her extra canvases and brushes and paints and stuff in there.

Some folks might have been disappointed to hear that, but not me. I was charmed. For the tools and supplies are what O'Keeffe used to make her art. She kept magic behind that door -- just as I'd suspected all along.

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These moments of bloggy curiosity have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.