Pelvis with the Distance 1943

Curator: Today we’re looking at Georgia O'Keeffe’s 1943 painting, "Pelvis with the Distance," rendered in her signature style with oil paint. Editor: It's immediately striking. The bone is monumental, stark white against that desert landscape. It feels… elemental, almost desolate. Curator: O'Keeffe created this while spending a significant amount of time in New Mexico. It’s crucial to remember that her move there was partly a means of escaping the New York art scene and assert her own independence. How does that impact how we read the art? Editor: That quest for autonomy definitely resonates here. Bones in the desert aren’t just bones—they become symbols of endurance, resilience, and the cycles of life in a harsh landscape. It’s also hard not to consider the broader politics of landscape art, and who gets to represent these spaces. Curator: Right. Her adoption of New Mexico brought her both immense recognition and also criticisms. She positioned herself in this "authentic" American Southwest, a very gendered and racialized construction in the mid-20th century, to make a unique mark. Editor: The painting process and cropping isolates this piece of the animal into something almost unrecognisable, maybe we’re not meant to be able to identify with where this comes from? I can almost read the piece like it is inviting conversation to the ideas of womanhood and death. I’m really captured by that negative space within the pelvic bone— it gives this real feeling of absence. Curator: That's interesting, this absence perhaps reflects a loss, but equally suggests the potential for filling it, for transformation. She constantly walked a line between the abstract and the representational. It's what has allowed critics, ever since the painting debuted, to endlessly search its subject matter for hidden forms or alternate realities. Editor: O'Keeffe encourages this. There’s a boldness to painting something so up-close, a fragment in isolation, placing bones on a vast landscape that commands you to contemplate their significance. Curator: Absolutely. O'Keeffe knew how to challenge the expectations of art and its role, of gender, representation and reception. "Pelvis with the Distance," stands as a powerful reminder of that challenge. Editor: I agree. Viewing "Pelvis with the Distance," now I’m left pondering on our place in these environments. How we are constantly being reborn and remembered as time progresses.