Welcome to Turning Corners: inspiring stories about the people and organizations working to make life better in the Four Corners states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. It’s a new podcast produced in Santa Fe, NM, by me, Wade Roush. For this very first episode of the show, I went inside Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to talk with artists and curators about a daring new exhibit called “Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country.” It’s an act of community storytelling, meant to both illuminate and soften some of the old boundaries and tensions between indigenous artists and the Anglo art establishment O’Keeffe represented. The exhibit features the work of a dozen artists from the six Tewa-speaking pueblos of northern New Mexico. All express in different ways their love of the vibrant land their people have inhabited for hundreds or thousands of years—and all grapple with the way O’Keeffe, still America’s most famous female artist, repeatedly framed the landscape around Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu as an empty, silent realm that she alone could properly interpret. “It’s my private mountain,” O’Keeffe once said of Tsi-p’in or Cerro Pedernal, the striking flat-topped mountain visible from her home. “It belongs to me. God told me that if I painted it enough, I could have it.” In point of fact, the mountain is on U.S. Forest Service land, and is the site of Tsi-p’in-owinge, a ruin that was the ancestral home of the people of Nambe, Ohkay Owingeh, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and Tesuque pueblos. So O’Keeffe’s quote—even if it was meant in a poetic or tongue-in-cheek way—rings in modern indigenous ears as a provocation. And indeed, for Jason Garcia, the Santa Clara Pueblo artist who co-curated the Tewa Nangeh exhibit, it served as an organizing theme. He worked with curators at the O’Keeffe Museum and with the contributing artists to gently overturn the idea that any one artist can speak for an entire region. To find out how, listen to the podcast using the player above, or find it in your favorite podcast app. The full transcript is below. FEATURED VOICES Jason Garcia, who also goes by Okuu Pin (Turtle Mountain), is an artist from Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico who specializes in clay tiles and printmaking. He co-curated of the Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country exhibit (2025-2026) at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Garcia’s work documents the ever-changing cultural landscape of his home, including cultural ceremonies, traditions, and stories, and also draws on 21st-century popular culture, comic books, and technology. Garcia’s juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary materials and techniques connects him to his Ancestral past, landscape, and cultural knowledge. He studied fine arts at the University of New Mexico (Bachelor’s, 1998) and the University of Wisconsin (MFA, 2016). Bess Murphy, PhD, is the Luce Curator of Art and Social Practice at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She joined the O’Keeffe Museum in 2022, and Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country, which she co-organized with Jason Garcia, is her first curated show at the museum. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Bard College and a PhD from the University of Southern California, and from 2015 to 2022 she was the creative director and curator of the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts in Santa Fe. Michael Namingha is a photographer and silkscreen artist who hails from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo in New Mexico and the Hopi tribe in Arizona. His work, which often features surrealistically altered images of the natural landscape, has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world, from New Mexico to Arizona, California, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Virginia, as well as Canada, Germany, and Japan. He splits his time between Santa Fe and Brooklyn, where his studio is located. He studied strategic design and management at the Parsons School of Design. Wade Roush is the creator and host of Turning Corners. He’s an MIT- and Harvard-trained freelance science and technology journalist, editor, and audio producer who has written for publications such as Science, MIT Technology Review, Xconomy, and Scientific American. From 2017 to 2025 he produced the tech-and-culture podcast Soonish. He’s the co-founder of the Hub & Spoke audio collective, the author of Extraterrestrials from the MIT Press, and the editor or co-editor of three volumes of hard science fiction: Twelve Tomorrows (2018), Tasting Light (2022), and Starstuff (2025). TRANSCRIPT [ Hub & Spoke sonic ID ] [Turning Corners theme music] Jason Garcia: And the image is a portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe standing within the Tewa landscape with the mountain Tsi-Pin, also known as Cerro Pedernal. And there’s a sign that’s a billboard that says welcome to O’Keeffe country. And then over the top of O’Keeffe it says Tewa Country. Wade Roush: Today on Turning Corners, a visit to Tewa Country. That’s the name of a new exhibit at Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, where Jason Garcia from Santa Clara Pueblo is one of the show’s stars and curators. He says the exhibit’s designed to change the way we think about New Mexico’s most famous artist and the people who actually live on the land she painted. [ theme music ] Georgia O’Keeffe archival tape: When I got to New Mexico, that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I had never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me. Exactly. That’s something that’s in the air. It’s just different. The sky is different. The stars are different. The wind is different. I shouldn’t say too much about this, because other people may get interested and I don’t want them interested. Wade Roush: Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of giant flowers had already made her a popular figure on the New York art scene by 1929, when she spent her first summer in northern New Mexico. She came here because she was looking for an escape from the social whirl orchestrated by her famous husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. And later she told interviewers over and over that she realized right away that New Mexico was special. It was where she would find everything she needed to reinvent herself as a painter. Specifically, a painter of landscapes. Georgia O’Keeffe: The cliffs over there. You look at it and it’s almost painted for you. You think. Until you try. I tried to paint what I saw. I thought someone could tell me how to but I found nobody could. They could tell you how they painted their landscape. But they couldn’t tell me to paint mine. Wade Roush: That very first summer in New Mexico, O’Keeffe bought a Model A Ford. One day she was taking driving lessons near the village of Abiquiu when she got her first glimpse of a rugged, picturesque canyon called Ghost Ranch. She recalled thinking that day, “This is my world.” Years later she bought an adobe house at the mouth of the canyon, and in 1949, after Stieglitz had died, she started living there full-time. Now, I’ve been to the Ghost Ranch house, and here’s the thing. From the central courtyard there’s a view of a mountain with a striking flat-topped silhouette. The Spanish called this mountain Cerro Pedernal and the people of the local Tewa-speaking pueblos call it Tsi-Pin, which means Flint Mountain or Flaking Stone Mountain. O’Keeffe started painting the mountain, from different vantage points and in different light. In fact, Pedernal became such a potent symbol for her that she ended up painting it 29 times. And many years later, in 1977, she was speaking to a reporter from Newsday when she said something interesting about Pedernal. She said, quote, “It’s my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.” You can understand why she felt this way. It’s very common for modern artists to fall in love with a subject, to paint them endlessly, and to end up feeling a kind of poetic but authentic ownership of this subject they know so well in every season, at every time of day. Just ask Claude Monet or Paul Cezanne what it’s like to fall in love with a mountain. O’Keeffe’s connection to Pedernal was so strong that she chose to have her ashes scattered over it when she died in 1986. To her, she was its spiritual owner. But of course, she wasn’t. To get legalistic about it—the mountain is on U.S. Forest Service land. More importantly, It’s the site of a ruin called Tsi-p’in-owinge that’s one of the ancestral homes of the people of the six pueblos of northern New Mexico that share the Tewa language—namely Nambe, Ohkay Owingeh, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and Tesuque. The point is, indigenous people have been calling the lands around Tsi-P’in home and representing the mountain in their own traditions for a very long time. But the fact is that O’Keeffe’s fame as a painter grew to eclipse that of just about every other artist in New Mexico. In that context, a phrase like “My private mountain” becomes the grist for some understandable tension and resentment. And that’s why I was standing recently in the middle of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum with artist Jason Garcia from Santa Clara Pueblo, looking at a piece of clay tile that he painted in the style of an old comic book cover. Jason Garcia: So we talk about O’Keeffe country and this terminology, this myth, mythological term, uh, for this area. And uh, one of the pieces that I do have in the work is, uh, you know, greets the visitor as they come into, uh, this gallery space, which is a, uh, entitled tales of suspense number 134. And the piece is called Welcome to Tewa country. And so the tile is made from hand processed clay hand gathered clay that’s been gathered near Santa Clara Pueblo. And then it’s painted with different mineral pigments that have been gathered in different areas of northern New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and
