Lost paradise: when holocaust is art

One person's holocaust is another's foreign policy solution.

On orders from President Franklin Roosevelt one of the largest concentration camps in the United States was built in Santa Fe in 1942 and imprisoned some 4,555 people of Japanese heritage. During World War II National Guard units from New Mexico became trapped on the Bataan peninsula where they experienced torture at the hands of soldiers of the Empire of Japan. Then under orders from war criminal, Harry Truman four Los Alamos scientists armed the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed over 200,000 children, women and men.

After visiting New Mexico in 1931 and living at Ghost Ranch during the Manhattan Project, already-wealthy artist Georgia O'Keeffe bought a dilapidated hacienda for $500 in Abiquiu, New Mexico from the Santa Fe Diocese then beginning in 1946 she spent a small fortune and over three years rebuilding it. The village is what is left of the colonial war on the Apache, Comanche and Navajo where detribalized but converted Puebloans who were captured by the Spanish or sold to the colonizers lived to work as slaves and servants. 

On Wednesday, accompanied by several others, Our Lady of the Arroyo, her man and a guest from Pennsylvania toured the sprawling but minimalist 7000 square foot villa. Our guide, Michelle conducts several visits a day from March through November. The tour ended on the edge of the mesa overlooking the Rio Chama where O'Keeffe had built a bomb shelter.

O’Keeffe moved in for good in 1949 – the year that the Soviet Union detonated their first nuclear test in Kazakhstan. Throughout the 1950s, nuclear tests took place all over the New Mexican desert, and O’Keeffe would have known about the infamous “Trinity” test that took place in 1945. According to Pita Lopez, Project Director for the Abiquiú Historic Properties, O’Keeffe built hers in the early 1960s because she “wanted to be around to see what the landscape would look like if there was ever a catastrophe.” [Georgia O’Keeffe’s Subterranean Fallout Shelter]

ip image: across the plaza from the O'Keeffe property is the abandoned El Piñon Theater.