O'Keeffe's New Mexico home a shrine to her fans

"Did you know," one of the girls asked me, "that Georgia O'Keeffe didn't like kids?"

I'd heard that, I told her, feeling uneasy about how to tell an 8-year-old there's a rumor the most popular girl in New Mexico wouldn't like her. How does that make you feel?

Sad. It was a chorus of eight little voices mumbling the same word.

Don't worry, announced one of the girls, tall and confident. She'd like us.

That was Isabella Stork, 10, who says she enjoys art more than ever now that she's well-versed in the ways of O'Keeffe. She likes talking about brush strokes and oils and canvases. She's in the fifth grade now.

When she was younger, a mere second-grader, she painted a mural the size of a cinder block inspired by the legendary artist.

Actually, they all did. Every wall in the foyer between second-grade classrooms is covered in tiny murals. Some are landscapes. Some are flowers. Some are skulls. Some are portraits — most of a grayed woman with a bun and a black dress looking to the side as if she's sizing something up.

These children go to Georgia O'Keeffe Elementary, an Albuquerque school where art lives and breathes and plays every day along with the students there.

Here, O'Keeffe's legacy is tangible.

It looks wide-eyed and rosy-cheeked. It smiles sheepishly. It gets excited over animal bones, big flowers and broad, colorful landscapes. It celebrates an artist by creating more art. And this living legacy does this even though it thinks Georgia O'Keeffe herself probably wouldn't have been interested.

Truth is, Georgia O'Keeffe, born in 1887 in true-to-its-name Sun Prairie, Wis., relished solitude. She liked big, empty spaces. She liked quiet. When she painted, she did so alone.

But she was also drawn to things that were interesting. She kept company with fellow artists, with photographers (including Ansel Adams), with adventurers (the Lindberghs vacationed at her Ghost Ranch home a time or two). She liked craggy trees and vivid colors and the intricacies of bones.

She found these things in New Mexico, which enchanted her during a road trip in the summer of 1917.

O'Keeffe eventually bought a pair of houses in New Mexico, where she'd retreat when city life began to overwhelm her. Later, when her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, died, she made New Mexico her permanent address, moving away from the bustle of New York.