The History
Taos, NM has long drawn artists seeking something beyond the noise—something elemental. Decades before Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin arrived, Mabel Dodge Luhan had already staked her claim on the desert as a place of transformation. A wealthy patron and cultural force, Luhan moved to Taos in 1917 and built a home that became a salon for some of the 20th century’s most influential artists, writers, and thinkers. D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Carl Jung, and eventually O’Keeffe herself all passed through her doors. She believed Taos was a place where art, community, and landscape converged, and she invited others to experience its light and cultural richness.
Into this atmosphere came Georgia O’Keeffe and later Agnes Martin—two artists who would find not just quiet, but clarity. Both left New York at the height of their careers—not in retreat, but in pursuit.
Solitude as a Way of Seeing
Born in 1887, Georgia O’Keeffe became a singular force in American modernism, celebrated for distilling the world into its most elemental forms. Though she rose to fame in New York, surrounded by acclaim and the energy of the Stieglitz circle, it was the desert that called her more insistently than any gallery could.
She first traveled to New Mexico in 1929 and returned nearly every summer, until making her permanent home in Abiquiú in 1949. There, the stark mesas, sun-bleached bones, and adobe walls became her lifelong companions. She painted them again and again—not from habit, but from devotion, convinced that within repetition lay revelation.
O’Keeffe believed that deep attention could transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. A flower, a fragment of bone, a slant of desert light—each, if truly seen, contained an entire cosmos. As she once wrote: “Still—in a way—nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
For O’Keeffe, solitude was a way of seeing. The desert became not just a landscape, but a practice—an invitation to look slowly, to listen deeply, and to discover worlds hidden in plain sight.
Silence as Devotion
Born in 1912 in rural Canada, Agnes Martin became known for her delicate grids and luminous fields of color, often grouped with the Abstract Expressionists in New York. Yet her path diverged radically. At the height of her recognition in 1967, she vanished—selling her possessions, leaving her studio, and stepping away from the art world entirely.
When she resurfaced, it was in the wide quiet of northern New Mexico. In Taos, she created a pared-down life: painting, writing, walking, and cultivating silence as though it were a sacred medium. The rigor of her daily rhythms gave form to work that is less about what one sees than what one feels—the stillness beneath the noise, the breath between thoughts, the subtle vibrations of being. For Martin, beauty was not spectacle but inner attunement. As she wrote: “Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. It is our positive response to life.” Her paintings do not shout for attention. They whisper—inviting us to pause, to quiet ourselves, and to encounter the infinite in the simplest of lines.
TOGETHER...
While O’Keeffe and Martin never met, their paths mirrored one another. Both turned inward and westward, leaving the art world’s center to live on their own terms. They made space for stillness. And from that stillness, they made enduring work.
This retreat steps into that lineage. Like O’Keeffe and Martin, we turn to the desert not to escape, but to listen more deeply. Their lives remind us that solitude and silence are not empty—they are conditions for clarity, for renewal, and for creative transformation. Here, together, we practice that same turning inward: making room for stillness, and seeing what new worlds might emerge.