Maria Chabot; Santa Fe ‘Treasure’

Maria Chabot, creator of the Indian markets in Santa Fe’s Plaza, a favorite with tourists and collectors, has died in Albuquerque.

She was 87.

Chabot, who had lived in Albuquerque since the 1960s, died July 9 in a hospital there.

Declared a “living treasure” of Santa Fe in 1996, Chabot lived an adventurous life that included managing the ranch of Indian art collector Mary Cabot Wheelwright and overseeing reconstruction of artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s winter home at Abiquiu, N.M. The hacienda was designated a national monument in 1998.

Chabot, in her travels and working with native arts north and south of the border, had long observed that Indians in Mexico seemed to fare better economically than those in New Mexico. Deciding that American Indians lacked Mexico’s markets, she set out to change things.

She began the Santa Fe markets during the Depression when she was executive secretary of the New Mexico Assn. of Indian Affairs. Aware that Indians lacked transportation to get their wares to town, she rented school buses to take them into Santa Fe for the once-a-week markets.

Intensely opposed in the beginning by local vendors as cutting into their business, the markets now are staged daily and attract 2 million visitors a year to the 4-century-old plaza.

Chabot extended her marketing efforts through the Federal Indian Arts and Crafts Board. She established cooperative marketing enterprises on Indian reservations throughout New Mexico and other states.

As a part of her work, Chabot went to pueblos to encourage women potters and other artists to sell their work. One of her proteges was Maria Martinez, considered the epitome of potters with her famed San Idelfonso Pueblo black-on-black wares.

Born in San Antonio, Chabot completed high school and studied Spanish and archeology in Mexico City before moving to Santa Fe in 1931 at the age of 18. A few years later, she took a freighter from the East Coast to France, where she spent two years studying art and picking grapes in the Provence wine country.

Always intending to become a writer, Chabot returned to Santa Fe during the Depression and took a job with the federal Works Progress Administration. Given a Model T Ford and a Brownie camera, she was assigned to document New Mexico’s Native American and Spanish Colonial arts and crafts.

She met Wheelwright when she photographed her collection of Navajo art, now housed in the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe. Sidetracked from her plans to write, Chabot managed Wheelwright’s ranch at Alcalde, N.M., for 20 years, eventually receiving the ranch as a gift. It was Wheelwright who introduced her to O’Keeffe.

During her long friendship with O’Keeffe, Chabot camped with the artist on her painting trips around northern New Mexico. One of O’Keeffe’s paintings is titled “Maria Goes to a Party.” Chabot took the familiar photograph of the artist on a motorcycle, dubbed “Women Who Rode Away.”

A book on the hundreds of letters exchanged by the women is to be published posthumously.

Married and divorced after six months in 1961, Chabot has no immediate survivors.