“Hogan-Minded”: Race and Place in Georgia O’Keeffe’s Southwest

“Hogan-Minded”: Race and Place in Georgia O’Keeffe’s Southwest

Date: 12 May 2026 (Tuesday)
Time: 10:15am-11:15am
Venue: Room 10.28, 10/f, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

All are welcome

This talk argues that past interpretations of Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexican oeuvre have obscured the extent, character, and stakes of her engagement with Southwestern Indigenous and Hispanic cultures. It contests the popular notion that after an initial, ostensibly more touristic period, O’Keeffe’s New Mexican work evinced a unique sense of place that had little to do with contemporary racial attitudes. Instead, it highlights the ongoing influence of tourist contexts (including visits to Indigenous ceremonials and involvement in regional commodity markets) on her work beyond the early 1930s, and suggests that, in its representation of buildings, objects, and places of spiritual significance to New Mexican Indigenous and Hispanic groups, her Southwestern oeuvre frequently relied upon and perpetuated romantic stereotypes about those cultures circulating within interwar Anglo-New Mexico and the Manhattan avant-garde. This argument unfolds with the help of several case studies, including discussion of her representations of Native American material objects, and especially Hopi katsina tithu, which she found spiritually and personally resonant yet failed to fully understand, and consideration of her depictions of Indigenous holy sites, which she often recast through the lenses of personal ownership, vague spiritual meaning, and modernist experimentation. Ultimately, O’Keeffe’s paintings and writings make clear that she saw the region much as countless others had before: both deeply informed by the presence and history of its Native peoples and open, empty, and ripe for claiming.

Speaker: James Denison is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Kalamazoo College and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. A graduate of Bowdoin College, he completed his doctorate at the University of Michigan in 2023.