Georgia and the Butch
Adapted from Maria Chabot - Georgia O'Keeffe: Correspondence, 1941-1949
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  • 2023 Reading sponsored by Southwest Harbor Public Library, Zoom

This is an adaptation of excerpts from the decade-long correspondence between two extraordinary women. One of them, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, is internationally acclaimed for her large flower paintings, as well as her New Mexico landscapes and her paintings of bleached animal bones. The other woman, Maria Chabot, is honored locally for her revival of the Santa Fe Indian Market, and for her design and oversight of the construction of O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu.
 
When the two women met in 1939, Maria was twenty-five and Georgia was fifty-two. Georgia had just bought a house in Ghost Ranch outside of Taos, New Mexico. She would spend her winters in Manhattan with her husband Alfred Stieglitz, and her summers in New Mexico. In the early years of the friendship, Maria worked as a “handyman” (her words) and seasonal property manager. In addition, she organized the camping trips, where she would accompany Georgia on plein-air painting excursions. In 1944, Georgia purchased an adobe ruin of a hacienda in Abiquiu, and, for the next five years, Maria would design and supervise the extraordinary restoration and remodel of this home, which has become a destination for O’Keeffe devotees from around the world.

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This adaptation is intended to highlight a controversial relationship that has been minimized, mischaracterized, or erased entirely from Georgia’s history. It is a relationship between an older, gender-non-conforming, fiercely independent artist and a young, lesbian butch who was experiencing profound confusion about her identity and about her place in the world.  Whatever imbalances and dysfunction there may have been between these incredibly strong-willed and visionary women, one cannot dispute that the camping trips with Maria resulted in some of Georgia’s most iconic landscapes, and that the house and garden at Abiquiu stand as a stunning testament to a lesbian’s devotion to her muse.  
 
2 women, one narrator
90 minutes
Single set
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