This past weekend, we took a break from fashion and traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico, taking in the sights and visiting various museums and art galleries. Santa Fe has an interesting history that goes back thousands of years before the the area was first colonized by the Spanish in 1610 and the interaction between various peoples and cultures has produced a unique location noted for its involvement with the arts and home to many artists. Here’s some artwork from Santa Fe’s Spanish past:

While we were in town, we took the opportunity to visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Georgia O’Keeffe was a well established artist before she first came to New Mexico in 1929 and spent an increasing amount of time there and ultimately taking up full-time residency by the 1940s. O’Keeffe is most noted for establishing the American Modernism movement in art which focused itself on human experience in a modern industrial world in America and mixed both abstract and realist styles (although the tendency was towards the abstract). More importantly, Modernism sought to divorce itself from traditional artistic forms and this was reflected in O’Keeffe’s work. Here’s just a few examples that we saw:

The one thing that struck us was her use of bold colors in forms that seem to set the various elements in her paintings apart from each other. The details are spare yet have an impact and this case especially be seen in this view of  Machu Picchu:

While the above is by no means an exhaustive survey of the art of Georgia O’Keeffe, what we saw was thought-provoking and we’ll be looking into this more in the future. What is especially striking is that it’s so divorced from what we’ve been seeing in museums throughout our travels in Europe and in the end, that’s probably a good thing in terms of balance. 🙂 What this means for fashion? We’re not sure except to say that it reinforces our appreciation of the role of color and makes us more conscious of its effects. Overall, Santa Fe was exciting to visit and we will definitely be returning in the future.