2020

In early March, just before the Covid-19 crisis closed down travel and normal business activities, we traveled to Texas and New Mexico where we conducted research for a new documentary about Georgia O’Keeffe. 

In the Texas Panhandle, we visited Palo Duro Canyon, where O’Keeffe spent many days hiking and sketching, and the little town of Canyon, where she taught at West Texas A&M University. We even scouted the attic room where she lived and painted during her time there, as a possible filming location, and met with Amy Von Lintel, one of our project consultants.

Next we spent three days at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, doing research in the fine arts collection and archives, with the expert guidance of a wonderful group of staff people under the direction of Executive Director Cody Hartley. On our team, in addition to Ellen and Paul, were our key consultant UVA Professor Beth Turner, lead researcher Johnathan Chance, and former Curator at the O’Keeffe Museum, Carolyn Kastner. 

On our final day in New Mexico, we had the opportunity to tour both of the O’Keeffe homes in New Mexico – in the town of Abiquiu and at Ghost Ranch – guided by Pita Lopez, who worked for Georgia O’Keeffe over the final years of her life. What a thrill to spend several hours in the rooms in which Georgia painted, slept, and cooked!

Now we’re safely back in Charlottesville, continuing the research and writing a treatment for the film, with the hope that we will be able to film later this summer.

Finally, we were thrilled to present the broadcast premiere of Black in Blue on Kentucky Educational Television, making the film available to everyone in the state so that they would understand the importance of what transpired at the University of Kentucky in the 1960s and its importance to the history of race relations in the south.