Maria Chabot

Maria Chabot (1913–2001), was an advocate for Native American arts, a rancher, and a friend of Georgia O'Keeffe. She was the general contractor for her house in Abiquiú, New Mexico and took the photograph of O'Keeffe entitled Women Who Rode Away, in which the artist was on the back of a motorcycle.^[1] Their correspondence was published in the book Maria Chabot—Georgia O'Keeffe: Correspondence 1941-1949.

Early life

Chabot was born in September 1913 in San Antonio, Texas. Her father had settled there after his family fled Mexico by horse-drawn wagon in 1910, during the Mexican Revolution. Her paternal grandfather was the English ambassador to Mexico. She graduated from high school at 15 years of age. Chabot originally wanted to be a writer and took a job as a copywriter.^[1]

She studied archaeology and the Spanish language in Mexico City. Having made friends with people from New Mexico, she moved to Santa Fe in 1931, when she was 18 years-old. She studied art in France in her 20s. While there she worked in the vineyards of Provence picking grapes.^[1]

Career

Native American advocate

Chabot moved back to Santa Fe and worked for the Works Progress Administration where she helped writers and artists find work and to document Spanish Colonial and Native American arts and crafts. She photographed the collection of Mary Cabot Wheelwright, who was a noted collector of Navajo art, now in the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.^[1]

Chabot was made the executive secretary of the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs in 1936. She established weekly fairs and rented schools buses to transport Native Americans to the markets where they could sell their jewelry, pottery, or other wares. Initially, local businesses opposed the Native American markets, which were established by Chabot to promote their works. She visited pueblos and encouraged artists to sell their works, including Maria Martinez, a potter of the San Ildefonso Pueblo. She worked then at the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Board where she established cooperative marketing organizations on reservations.^[1]

Rancher

She ran Wheelwright's cattle ranch and fruit tree orchard at Alcalde, New Mexico for 20 years. During that period, she was president of the local irrigation association. The ranch was deeded to Chabot by Wheelwright upon her death.^[1]

Georgia O'Keeffe

In 1940, Chabot met O'Keeffe, with whom she had a friendship.^[2] She spent the summers at her house on the Ghost Ranch from 1941 to 1944, spending most of her time managing the ranch. She also camped with O'Keeffe in northern New Mexico and was captured in the painting Maria goes to a Party in one of O'Keeffe's paintings of their trips. Chabot helped design and supervised the rebuilding of an adobe hacienda in Abiquiú for O'Keeffe. She said of the experience, "I had never found anything as romantic as this beat-up building, a ruin really... It took six months just to get the pigs out of the house."^[1] Chabot and O'Keeffe exchanged almost 700 letters, which were published in 2004 in the book Maria Chabot—Georgia O'Keeffe: Correspondence 1941-1949.^[2][3]

Personal life

In 1961, Chabot married radio astronomer Dana K. Bailey who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Married for only six months, she said, "we were much better as friends than as husband and wife." In the 1960s, she sold the ranch that she had inherited from Wheelwright and moved to Albuquerque, where she cared for her mother.^[1]

She was named a "Living Treasure" of Santa Fe in 1996. Chabot died on July 9, 2001 at 87 years of age in an Albuquerque hospital.^[1]

References