Curator, Patricia Marroquin Norby: Hello, I’m Patricia Marroquin Norby, Associate Curator of Native American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 1934, Georgia O’Keeffe and her friend drive through Colorado, where O’Keeffe purchases a necklace made of large, black sea beads and eagle claws.
She doesn’t depict them as one long necklace. Instead, she bunches them together into this round form. She uses a very fuzzy application of her charcoal for the beads, but then for the eagle claws, she uses the paper surface as a highlight to create a shiny surface, and so you get this really nice textural conversation between the beads and the claws.
I find that interesting that she refers to them as “Indian beads,” rather than learning the appropriate name for the community or person from whom she purchased them. It reminds me of the fact that, although she lived in Abiquiú, New Mexico for half a century, she never bothered to learn Spanish. She never bothered to learn Tewa. She, on the one hand, loved the community who surrounded her but also she really didn’t extend herself.
That sense of isolation—it’s communicated visually in her work because she often only depicts one item, one subject, something that’s isolated within her image.