Work may begin later this year on a new 56,000-square-foot facility that will be a part of the internationally acclaimed Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe.
The main museum, which was opened in the summer of 1997, is located at 217 Johnson Street, and houses the extensive works of O’Keefe, who died in 1986 and is regarded as a premiere exemplar of both naturalism and modernism in her paintings.
Museum officials have long wanted to open a second museum on a one-acre site at 123 Grant Avenue, across the street from the main facility.
According to the museum’s website, the Johnson Street facility is no longer large enough to adequately store and care for the O’Keefe collection, which includes up to 140 oil paintings and 120 watercolors, not to mention thousands of photographs.
The new exhibition space will also be designed to showcase the works of other artists.
Members of the city’s Historic Districts Review Board have now given a unanimous approval to what is expected to be a $75 million project. That approval came despite the objections of staff who said the project as proposed fell short of some city codes.
According to the Santa Fe Reporter, museum director Cody Hartley commented that the objective all along has been to “build or create an iconic building worthy of our namesake artist and worthy of our community.”
The construction of the new facility will first require the demolition of a building that for nearly half a century, from 1941 to the early 1990s, housed a Safeway grocery store, but in recent years has served as an education annex for the museum.
The demolition of that structure is expected to begin later this spring.
By Garry Boulard
