October 9–13, 2025 | Taos, NM
\STILLNESS STUDY
A creative retreat centering art, history, place, and inquiry.
What does it mean to choose solitude—not as escape, but as devotion?
STILLNESS STUDY is a gathering centering this provocation. Together, we’ll explore the lives, work, and rhythms of Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin, two artists who both turned to the quiet of New Mexico to shape their work. O’Keeffe through the wide silence of Abiquiú, Martin through the disciplined stillness of line and form. Each carved space for interior listening, for devotion as practice.
Over five days in the high desert of Taos, we’ll step into solitude not as absence, but as fertile ground for clarity, perception, and creative renewal. Our days will weave visits to O’Keeffe’s home and Ghost Ranch, a guided meditation with Agnes Martin’s work, and reflective practices designed to invite slowness, spaciousness, and artistic return.
This retreat is for those drawn to quiet intensity—for anyone who feels something sacred at the edge of retreat, and who is ready to reorient toward the self as source.
Retreat Highlights
Curated Programming—
- Day trip to Ghost Ranch
- Visit to Georgia O’Keeffe’s Home & Studio
- Curator-led meditation at Harwood Museum in the Agnes Martin gallery
- Mountain workshop with Native Roots, a local ancestral folk medicine school
A thoughtful container—
- A cozy stay at the historic Hacienda del Sol
- Chef-prepared meals inspired by Georgia’s cooking philosophy
- Going deep with likeminded seekers
- An intimate container of 10 participants
- Time for individual stillness practice
Retreat Snapshot
Thursday, Oct 9
ARRIVAL IN TAOS
- Shuttle from ABQ or SF airports
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Settle in at Hacienda del Sol
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Ease into Stillness Study Practice
Friday, Oct 10
O’KEEFFE & THE SOLITUDE OF PLACE
- Private tour @ Ghost Ranch
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Chef prepped meals
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Time for wandering, sketching
- Stillness Study Practice
Saturday, Oct 11
SOLITUDE AS CREATIVE RITUAL
- Tour @ O’Keeffe’s Home & Studio
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Private tour @ Harwood Museum
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Curator led meditation
- Stillness Study practice
Sunday, Oct 12
LAND AS TEACHER & COLLABORATOR
- Workshop with Native Roots
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Guided plant walk & meditation
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Deep listening with plants
- Stillness Study practice
Monday, Oct 13
CLOSING & DEPARTURES
- Dip @ Ojo Caliente Hot Springs (optional side quest)
Meet Your Guide
Their work is shaped by art history and spiritual inquiry, along with a deep commitment to making creative renewal accessible. They are a Berkeley trained executive coach and an ever-curious student of facilitation, self-inquiry, and artistic process.
Skypunch is an ongoing experiment—a space to get lost on purpose, to follow questions like threads, and to gather in the quiet where creativity stirs.
Want to chat with Erica to see if the retreat is right for you?
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.
Why We’re Gathering
Today’s creatives are up against a different kind of noise: the hum of Slack notifications, the endless scroll of “inspiration,” the pressure to make everything shareable. Even rest starts to feel performative. Solitude—the real kind—has become harder and harder to access.
This retreat is a deliberate interruption.
Stillness Study invites you to step away from the pace of productivity and re-enter something quieter, deeper, and more sustaining. Through the lens of Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin—two artists who each chose silence, space, and presence over the clamor of New York—we’ll explore how solitude can sharpen perception, deepen focus, and renew creative practice.
Solitude isn’t absence. It’s how we shape our inner and outer worlds in its presence. Over four days in Taos, we’ll weave together time in nature, guided reflection, and creative exploration to consider solitude as devotion: a practice that clarifies, sustains, and transforms.
This is an intimate, reflective gathering. Days will be spacious but intentional, balancing landscape immersion, group dialogue, and quiet personal time. We’ll close by asking: how can solitude remain with us—not as escape, but as rhythm, as presence, as ongoing practice?
You crave space—physically, mentally, creatively.
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You find inspiration in the quiet.
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You love a good art history deep dive.
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You’re open to seeing what solitude stirs in you.
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You like your conversations deep and your solitude deeper.
You deeply dread intimate group time.
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You are allergic to quiet and boredom.
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You can’t fully break from your 9–5.
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You crave a robe and room service.
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You rather be posting on main.
“I love the idea of building a community centered around a shared investigation.
The theme really spoke to me and my interests.”
Participant, The Winter Fold
Participant, The Winter Fold
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Thematic Exploration
What does it mean to be truly alone with yourself—not in isolation, but in reverence?
How does solitude shift when we treat it as a devotion, rather than a retreat from the world?
O’Keeffe and Martin each carved out space—physically and mentally—to enter into deep relationship with themselves. This retreat explores how space shapes our inner landscapes, creative clarity, and the quiet rituals that sustain us.
The Architecture of Aloneness
Solitude is something we shape.
O’Keeffe built a life of spacious devotion, designing her surroundings with precision and care. Martin’s stripped-down world was a radical act of focused love—for simplicity, for silence, for her practice.
What do we remove? What do we cherish? How do the structures we build—internally and externally—support a life of intentional, creative devotion?
Stillness isn’t absence—it’s presence intensified.
It asks for attunement, for practice, for faith in what can’t be forced. Through repetition, walking, and quiet observation, we begin to notice what’s always been there: a subtle creative current, alive beneath the surface.
This is stillness not as pause, but as prayer. As source.
Carrying Solitude Forward
Solitude, when approached as devotion, gives us more than rest—it gives us rhythm.
The works of O’Keeffe and Martin weren’t simply made in solitude; they were born from it, shaped by the rituals and boundaries that protected it.
As we close, we’ll reflect on how to continue tending this space—so that solitude remains not a temporary escape, but an ongoing relationship with self, with place, and with practice.
The Flow
The retreat unfolds like a story: beginning with Georgia O’Keeffe—wide and expansive at Ghost Ranch—then moving inward to the intimacy of her home and the meditative rigor of Agnes Martin, before closing in communion with land and elements.
Thursday, October 9 ⊹ Arrival in Taos
- Plan to land in NM by the late morning of October 9
(Taos is a 2.5 hour drive from ABQ, shuttles have limited scheduling) - No programming this day—just time to land and settle in
Vibe: spacious, grounding, arriving at your own pace
Friday, October 10 ⊹ O’Keeffe & the Solitude of Place
We begin wide, in the vast desert where O’Keeffe painted. The day invites exploration, reflection, and time with the landscape that shaped her work.
- Private walking tour of Ghost Ranch
- Picnic-style lunch outdoors
- Open time for wandering, sketching, photographing, meditating, or resting with the land
Vibe: expansive, playful, immersed in place
Saturday, October 11 ⊹ Solitude as Creative Ritual
The day moves inward—from the intimate rooms of O’Keeffe’s Abiquiú home to the deep silence of Agnes Martin’s paintings.
- Tour of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Home & Studio
- Private Slow Art Tour & Meditation with curator Gwendolyn Fernandez at the Harwood Museum, focused on Agnes Martin
- Space for creative prompts, gentle walks, or quiet reflection
Vibe: contemplative, devotional, tending the inner world
Sunday, October 12 ⊹ Land as Teacher & Collaborator
Guided by Native Roots, we’ll walk into the mountains to learn directly from plants and elements—listening, identifying, and exploring their wisdom as companions and teachers.
- Guided plant walk: identification, medicinal uses, and traditional/folk practices
- Elemental meditations and deep listening with plants
- Conversations on how relationship with the natural world can shift perspective, heal, and reframe how we move through life
Vibe: earthy, relational, transformative
Monday, October 13 ⊹ Closing & Departures
As we close, we’ll reflect on how to carry this forward—so solitude is not a temporary escape, but an ongoing relationship with self, with place, and with practice.
- Morning group reflection
- Check-out and departures
- *EXTRA* For those extending their trip, or with later flights, you’re invited to join me at Ojo Caliente for a restorative dip in the hot springs (optional, contingent on travel plans).
Vibe: spacious closure, carrying solitude forward.
“Thinking critically about art/artists and connecting their work to my life was most meaningful. Often times in a museum it's forced or strained; this was authentically resonant.”
Participant, The Winter Fold
Participant, The Winter Fold
Lodging
For our time together, we’ll be staying at Hacienda del Sol, a historic adobe inn nestled at the base of Taos Mountain. Surrounded by sweeping desert views and the Sangre de Cristo range, the inn offers both intimacy and expanse—a place to rest, reflect, and connect with the landscape that has drawn artists and seekers for generations.
History & Spirit
Once part of the Mabel Dodge Luhan estate, Hacienda del Sol carries forward a legacy of creative gathering. In the early 20th century, figures like Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Carl Jung, and D.H. Lawrence all passed through this circle—drawn by Taos’s light, land, and cultural richness. The inn still hums with that spirit of inspiration and hospitality.
Your Stay
Each room is unique, blending traditional adobe architecture with warm, eclectic charm. Mornings begin with prepared breakfasts in the communal dining space. Courtyards and gardens open toward the mountains, offering quiet corners for journaling, reflection, or coffee at sunrise. Shared outdoor spaces invite both solitude and connection.
Why Here
Choosing Hacienda del Sol is not just about comfort—it’s about continuity. This land has long held space for creative renewal. By staying here, we step into the same lineage of artists and visionaries who sought stillness, inspiration, and community in this landscape.