The artist as a draw

“They’re having an O’Keeffe day here. Come on over,” says the guy on the cellphone as he checks out the action on the city’s historic central plaza. Mariachis and marimba players give their all on the outdoor stage. Then Sister Mary and the Bad Habits, a local blues rock band, takes its turn, belting out heart-wrenching songs for an audience of families, over-the-hill couples and adolescents in outrageous outfits. Nearly everyone who wanders into the area is tagged with an O’K Day sticker.

O’K Day? Is this any way to treat Georgia O’Keeffe, the late, great, famously reclusive artist who lived in the villages of Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, a safe distance from Santa Fe’s tourist mecca? A painter whose trademark images of bleached bones and desert landscapes epitomize her love affair with the profound quiet and open space of northern New Mexico?

The hoopla may be at odds with the personality of the artist -- a pioneering Modernist painter and famously independent woman who died in 1986, at 99 -- but the museum devoted to her life and work is celebrating its 10th anniversary. And the community festival that has brought about 5,000 people to the plaza on a recent Saturday isn’t the half of it. A yearlong series of events includes workshops, exhibitions, lectures by “women of distinction,” public readings of the artist’s letters, desert walks and a motorcycle ride through O’Keeffe country. The festivities culminate Aug. 24-25 with a lecture by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at Santa Fe’s Performing Arts Center, an exclusive dinner at O’Keeffe’s house in Abiquiu, a concert by jazz vocalist Diana Krall at the Santa Fe Opera’s open-air theater and a gala at the museum.

“I think we’ll all have O’Keeffe fatigue when this is over,” says George G. King, who has directed the museum for most of its life.

King presides over a small institution with unusually big ideas, but he’s not alone. Leaders of one-artist museums across the country -- including the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., the Isamu Noguchi Museum in New York and the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Mont. -- spend their days dreaming up ways to promote the legacies of individual artists. Instead of creating a shrine or a morgue, directors of these museums try to position the artist as the center of a universe that reaches out to scholars, artists and the public.

For the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, there is much to celebrate: a collection that has grown from 118 to 2,993 artworks, including 1,149 works by O’Keeffe; an exhibition program that has featured works by 150 artists; a research center devoted to American Modernism; ambitious outreach and education initiatives; a $20-million endowment; and an annual attendance of 175,000, the highest of any museum in New Mexico.

“The No. 1 question tourists ask is: ‘Where is the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum?’ ” says City Councilor Karen Heldmeyer, speaking from the stage on O’K Day. “It used to be ‘Where are the bathrooms?’ That’s got to be a big change for culture in Santa Fe.”

It’s also a significant achievement for a museum devoted to a single artist, no matter how popular. Unlike general art museums that attract repeat visitors with temporary exhibitions on a broad range of topics, one-artist museums have a special problem: the been-there, done-that syndrome.

The solution for some of these museums, says Hugh Davies, who leads an institution with a relatively broad purview, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, is to make the artist part of a big picture. “Contextualizing the dead artist’s work by also exhibiting the work of contemporary colleagues and living followers creates a reason for another visit.”

“Contextualizing” for the O’Keeffe means exhibitions that include up-to-the-minute abstractions by conceptualist Sherrie Levine as well as works by associates of O’Keeffe and her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. It also means “art and leadership” workshops, scholarly conferences and a research center that interprets American Modernism as a movement running from the 1890s to the present.

One-artist museums are largely a European phenomenon, but they have cropped up in the United States over the last century. Up-to-date records don’t exist, but a survey done in 1998 lists about 45 American museums and historic homes or studios devoted to single artists. They might be expected to have the world’s best collections of the artists’ work, but with limited acquisition funds, they compete with larger institutions for gifts of artworks. As a result, the quality and quantity of their art holdings vary considerably. The Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, N.Y., maintains a comprehensive collection of the artist’s paintings, sketches and sculptures in his former home. At the Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio in Kansas City, Mo., the emphasis is on the artist’s domestic and professional environment.

Many one-artist museums host occasional exhibitions of works by other artists. But that won’t happen at the Clyfford Still Museum, expected to open in 2010 in Denver. Still, an Abstract Expressionist painter who maintained extraordinarily strict control of his work during his lifetime, made provisions to bequeath his estate -- including most of his paintings -- to a city that would build a museum exclusively devoted to his art.

Each of these institutions has its own agenda. But only a few -- such as the museums dedicated to Pop artist Warhol and illustrator Rockwell -- have the wherewithal to keep their namesakes in the public eye and make their legacies seem perpetually relevant. If there’s a formula for success, it requires a major collection of an immensely popular artist’s work and a well-stocked research facility, attractively located in proximity to where the artist lived or worked. It also takes money and passion.

Hitting their stride

The O’Keeffe museum was founded in 1995 by philanthropists Anne W. and John L. Marion. It opened in 1997 in a 12,000-square-foot building, designed as a Spanish Baptist church and converted into an art gallery, near the central plaza. The research center, in a nearby historic building, opened in 2001 under the direction of Barbara Buhler Lynes, curator of the museum and author of O’Keeffe’s catalogue raisonné. In 2006, the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation transferred its stewardship of about 1,000 O’Keeffe artworks, extensive archival materials and the artist’s houses in Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch to the museum, making it the leading repository of her work. Supported primarily by private sources, the museum operates on an annual budget of $6.2 million.

The O’Keeffe has had a broad outlook from the get-go. It took a few years for the Andy Warhol Museum to fully tap into its artist’s milieu -- popular culture. A collaborative project of the Carnegie Institute, Dia Center for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Warhol museum was launched in 1994, seven years after the artist’s death. Located in Pittsburgh, Warhol’s hometown, the museum initially focused sharply on his work. Today -- with a collection of more than 12,000 Warhol artworks, including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, films and videos, a huge archive and an annual operating budget of more than $3 million -- the museum describes itself as “a vital forum in which diverse audiences of artists, scholars and the general public are galvanized through creative interaction with the art and life of Andy Warhol. The Warhol is ever-changing and constantly redefining itself in relation to contemporary life, using its unique collections and dynamic, interactive programming as tools.”

Why the switch?

“Two reasons,” says Thomas Sokolowski, director of the museum. “The pragmatic one is that Pittsburgh is not a tourist city. If we were in New York or Paris, we would have new tourists coming in all the time and we could have a monolithic treatment of Warhol that would stay up forever.” About 70,000 people visited the Pittsburgh institution last year.

“The more emblematic and spiritual reason is that he was a great American artist who was very influential in many different realms,” he says. “I think Warhol understood the 20th century and on into the 21st century better than anyone because he was the epitome of the American dream. He was a working-class artist who understood the media and knew what people wanted. What he did in terms of being a star for 15 minutes is in MySpace and YouTube. A museum that’s about his life has to have all that. It’s about giving Warhol his due and not just seeing him as a salon artist.”

Temporary exhibitions on view at the moment are “Personal Jesus: The Religious Art of Keith Haring and Andy Warhol,” photographs of New York by rock star Lou Reed and a group show that explores “gender identity.” A few years ago, the museum displayed historic Chinese ancestor portraits alongside Warhol’s images of the rich and famous. Now Sokolowski is kicking around the notion of celebrity portraits through the ages, including Roman statues, 17th century Dutch paintings and American art of the 1960s.

“There are always crass people who want to be seen as wealthy,” he says. “Unless we have a world change and people become Zen, Warhol won’t go out of fashion.”

Elevating the everyday

The Norman Rockwell Museum is banking on the continuing appeal of illustration, which ties into social issues, politics and history. Founded in 1969 in a historic house in Stockbridge, Mass. -- the town in the Berkshires where Rockwell spent the last 25 years of his life -- the museum has undergone a considerable transition.

“For the first 20 years,” says Director Laurie Norton Moffatt, “we were exclusively Rockwell and we grew entirely by public demand. Word got out and people started coming. Within 10 years, we were seeing an attendance of about 100,000 a year.”

Rockwell died in 1978, leaving his collection and archives to the museum. As the collection grew to encompass 574 original paintings and drawings and a 100,000-piece archive of photographs, correspondence and business documents, more space was needed. In 1993, the museum moved into a new building, designed by architect Robert A.M. Stern, on a 36-acre site overlooking the Housatonic River Valley. Rockwell’s Stockbridge studio and its contents were moved onto the new campus.

“All through the planning and moving, the board of directors thought about creating a context around Norman Rockwell,” Moffatt says. “He was proud of being an illustrator. He worked for a mass audience through a mass-media format. That’s an important part of his history and this nation’s history. This whole field of study is important in understanding how he came to be so acclaimed and widely known. Since we opened the new campus, we have had a very active changing exhibition program on the work of other illustrators.”

With an annual attendance of 150,000 and an operating budget of $4 million, the museum maintains a core exhibition of Rockwell’s work and spotlights specific aspects of his artistic output. Past exhibitions of other artists’ works have featured Remington’s Civil War drawings, illustrations by Maxfield Parrish and Rockwell Kent, comic strips by Charles Schulz and cartoons from the New Yorker. Currently on view is “Ephemeral Beauty: Al Parker and the American Women’s Magazine 1940-1960.” And for something entirely different, next up is “LitGraphic: The World of the Graphic Novel.”

Such temporary attractions appeal to scholars and encourage the locals to come back for another look. But it can be tricky to strike the right balance between the star attraction and the surrounding constellation.

“We certainly celebrate Norman Rockwell as our focal point and centerpiece and believe that we are caring for a national treasure,” Moffatt says. “If the balance tips too much away from him and if the icons, such as the ‘Four Freedoms,’ are missing -- especially in the summer when we get our biggest crowds -- some visitors are upset. But there’s strong support for a broadened program, provided we keep Norman Rockwell front and center.”

At the O’Keeffe, the galleries are full of artworks by or about the artist during the summer, high-tourist time. But works by other artists complement the main attraction the rest of the year and many other programs continue year-round.

As curator Lynes puts it, “We are trying to demonstrate that in spite of Georgia O’Keeffe’s being larger than life, she fits into a framework of history. She had a lot of connections with the artists of the Stieglitz Circle, her ideas were relevant to what was going on in American Modernism at the beginning of the 20th century and she was quite an innovator in terms of abstraction. She was a major force in American art and remains a major force in American art. People come here to see her work, but they are beginning to come here to learn something about her.”

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suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com