Artist Georgia O’Keeffe may be Northern New Mexico’s most famous transplant, but to some students at Cariños de los Niños Charter School, she was an unknown.
That inspired Cariños Spanish and fine arts teacher Mariola Jimenez, to come up with the idea to educate her fifth- and sixth-grade students about O’Keeffe’s life while tapping into their creative side.
Jimenez said she assigned the children online O’Keeffe biographical information and directed them to make informational posters about the former Ghost Ranch resident. This helped the children fulfill the bilingual curriculum Cariños specializes in.
If children needed further reference, fifth-grade teacher Nora Martinez offered a personal perspective to O’Keeffe’s history.
Martinez said she grew up in Abiquiú when O’Keeffe was alive and met her on multiple occasions. According to Martinez, O’Keeffe was a huge benefactor for the community.
“She actually helped many city members through employment and personal appearances,” Martinez said.
Jimenez said the hardest part of creating the assignment was finding online research in Spanish for the students to utilize.
But Spanish wasn’t a necessary component for the artistic portion of the assignment.
Jimenez said her students were directed to recreate an O’Keeffe painting while adding their personal stamp to the project.
“That’s a good thing, that the students put in their own creativity,” she said.
For instance, sixth-grader Zachary Salazar recreated O’Keeffe’s “Cow Skull: Red, White and Blue” painting. His personal touch consisted of adding color to the horns instead of leaving them the traditional white.
“I just want to keep a little bit of me in it,” Salazar said.
O’Keeffe’s painting of a local landmark was also the subject of creative reinterpretation by the Cariños students.
Sixth-graders Brandon Alire and Noe Soto-Baca re-imagined “Cebolla Church” with yellow walls instead of the pink walls that characterize O’Keeffe’s famous painting.
Despite not knowing of her existence until recently, some of the students found inspiration from an artist that was born in 1887.
Destany Esparza said she found inspiration in the colors O’Keeffe used in her painting while Stephanie Soto de la Cruz found her artistic muse in O’Keeffe’s “Stairway to Heaven” painting, which depicts a singular ladder backdropped across a blue evening sky and a half moon.
All of the students artwork is currently featured in the Cariños conference room.