RESEARCH CENTER
PUTTING O’KEEFFE IN CONTEXT: THE MARIA CHABOT PAPERS AT THE GEORGIA O’KEEFFE MUSEUM RESEARCH CENTER LAURA WARD
Unknown photographer. Maria Chabot, 1944. Gelatin silver print. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of Maria Chabot. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center recently made a large collection of archives donated by the estate of Maria Chabot (1913–2001) available to the public. Chabot was a friend and associate of O’Keeffe’s, and the collection includes materials that contextualize O’Keeffe’s life and work. The archives include Chabot’s personal records related to O’Keeffe: diaries, correspondence, audio interviews with Chabot, photographs, slides, negatives, an unpublished book on Chabot’s time as a companion of O’Keeffe at Ghost Ranch, and documents referencing the 1945–1949 renovation of O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiú, New Mexico. Outside of her association with O’Keeffe, Maria Chabot was known as a writer, and as an advocate for Native American and Spanish Colonial artistic traditions in the American Southwest. The bulk of the collection relates to 6
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those roles, including: Chabot’s research on Native American arts and artists; published articles she wrote in the 1930s on Indian arts and crafts; and her literary works of fiction and nonfiction, including more than 60 drafts and completed short stories, novels, and essays written by Chabot over her lifetime, along with rejection letters from publishers. Maria Chabot was a daughter of the American West. Her grandfather was the British consular agent at San Luis Potosí, Mexico, in the 1860s, before settling with his family in San Antonio, Texas, where Chabot was born on September 18, 1913. In 1933, at 19 years old, she traveled to Mexico City, where she met the painter Dorothy Newkirk Stewart and her sister, Margretta Stewart Dietrich. The Stewart sisters introduced Chabot to a community of Mexican artists that included José Clemente Orozco. Chabot accepted Dorothy Stewart’s invitation to return with her to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1934, where she first took a job with the New Mexico Department of Vocational Education, and later, in 1935, with the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Under the auspices of these agencies and as part of a Works Progress Administration (WPA) initiative, she and Stewart photographed and documented Native American and Spanish Colonial arts and crafts in the Southwest. In 1936, with Margretta Dietrich, who was then president of the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs, Chabot helped establish Santa Fe’s Indian Market as a weekly event modeled on Mexican outdoor markets, held under the portal of Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors. She also proposed that native artists be allowed to set their own prices. These art markets became the popular annual Santa Fe Indian Market. Through her association with Stewart and her work with the WPA, Chabot met Mary Cabot Wheelwright, founder of the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art (later renamed the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian). Wheelwright became Chabot’s benefactor, and employed her to manage one of Wheelwright’s properties: the historic Los Luceros hacienda, in Alcalde, New Mexico. Chabot oversaw labor and supervised agriculture there, and became president of the local irrigation association—at the time, an unusual position for a woman, and one that included adjudicating disputes over water rights. Chabot was deeded the Los Luceros property after Wheelwright’s death, but sold it in the 1960s. It was Wheelwright who introduced Chabot to Georgia O’Keeffe, in New Mexico, in 1940. Chabot, then 26, was an aspiring writer; O’Keeffe was 53, and an important artist. From 1941 to 1944, Chabot spent summers with O’Keeffe at the artist’s Ghost Ranch house, assisting her with chores so that O’Keeffe could spend more time painting. Chabot