Maria Chabot was a writer and an advocate for Native American and Spanish Colonial artistic traditions.
Chabot's paternal grandfather was British consular agent at San Luis Potosi, Mexico in the 1860s. He later settled with his family in San Antonio, Texas where Chabot was born on September 18, 1913. In 1933, at nineteen years old, she traveled to Mexico City. There she met painter Dorothy Stewart and her sister Margretta Stewart Dietrich and notable Mexican artists including Jose Clemente Orozco. Chabot accepted Stewart's invitation to return to Santa Fe, New Mexico with her in 1934, where she took a job with the New Mexico Department of Vocational Education, and then in 1935 with the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Under the auspices of these agencies and as part of a Works Progress Administration (WPA) initiative she photographed and documented Native American and Spanish Colonial arts and crafts in the Southwest. In 1936, with New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs president Margretta Dietrich, Chabot helped to establish Santa Fe's "Indian Market" as a weekly event modeled on Mexican outdoor markets and held under the Santa Fe Palace of the Governors portal. She also proposed that native artists be allowed to set their own prices. These art markets became the popular annual Santa Fe Indian Market.
Through her association with Stewart and work with the WPA Chabot met Mary Cabot Wheelwright, founder of the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art (renamed the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.) Wheelwright became Chabot's benefactor and employed her to manage her property, the historic Los Luceros hacienda in Alcalde, New Mexico. Chabot oversaw labor and supervised agriculture. She also became president of the local irrigation association, an unusual position for a woman at the time, and adjudicated disputes over water rights. Chabot was deeded Los Luceros after Wheelwright's death but sold it in the 1960s.
Wheelwright introduced Chabot to Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico in 1940. Chabot was twenty-six and an aspiring writer and O'Keeffe was fifty-three and an important artist. From 1941 to 1944, Chabot spent summers with O'Keeffe at the artist's Ghost Ranch house. Chabot had intended to write, but spent most of her time managing activities at the ranch. She also often accompanied O'Keeffe on camping trips throughout northern New Mexico on which the artist created many of her paintings. In 1946, Chabot agreed to manage the rebuilding of an adobe hacienda on a hilltop in Abiquiu, 48 miles northwest of Santa Fe. She supervised the building crew and participated in design decisions for what became O'Keeffe's primary residence. The friendship between Chabot and O'Keeffe endured until O'Keeffe's death in 1986.
In 1996, Chabot was named a "Living Treasure" of Santa Fe. She died in 2001, at eighty-seven years old, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
-- Biography from Maria Chabot Papers Finding Aid
Left to Right:
Maria Chabot, On Ghost Ranch House Roof, ca. 1944. Maria Chabot Archive. Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. Gift of Maria Chabot.
Maria Chabot and Skull, ca. 1944. Maria Chabot Archive. Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. Gift of Maria Chabot.
Maria Chabot, On Ghost Ranch House Roof, 1944. Maria Chabot Archive. Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. Gift of Maria Chabot.
