Maria Chabot

Maria Chabot (September 19, 1913 – July 9, 2001) was a writer, an advocate for Native American arts, a rancher, and a friend of Georgia O'Keeffe. She led the restoration, design, and building of O'Keeffe's home and studio in Abiquiú, New Mexico. She was also a gifted photographer, and took many famous photographs of the artist and her life. These include photos of camping trips to the Black Place and the photograph of O'Keeffe entitled Women Who Rode Away, which shows the artist sitting on the back of a motorcycle driven by Maurice Grosser. Some correspondence related to the building of the Abiquiu house was published in the book Maria Chabot—Georgia O'Keeffe: Correspondence 1941–1949.

Chabot was instrumental in establishing the modern Santa Fe Indian Market. She worked for the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs and the federal Office of Indian Affairs documenting Native American arts and crafts. Chabot has been described as "a photographer, writer, and explorer".

Early life Mary Lee "Maria" Chabot was born on September 19, 1913, in San Antonio, Texas, the daughter of Charles Jasper Chabot, a capitalist, and his third wife Olive Anderson Johnston. Maria Chabot had three half-siblings who reached adulthood from her parents' previous marriages: Frederick Charles Chabot, Edith Lilian Chabot, and James Kennedy Johnston (the son from Olive's first marriage.)

Chabot developed an interest in writing as a girl. After graduating early from Brackenridge high school, Chabot took a job as copywriter at a San Antonio department store and also wrote short stories. She continued to write fiction into the 1960s, but the short stories and novels were never published.

She traveled in 1933 to Mexico City to pursue her interests in literature and art To complete her photographic survey, she traveled throughout the Southwestern United States in the 1930s and 1940s. for New Mexico Magazine to inform potential buyers on how to identify valuable works of art.

Chabot was made the executive secretary of the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs in 1936. modeled after the outdoor markets in Mexico, which she established despite initial opposition from local businesses. She served as a companion to Wheelwright and ran the cattle ranch, farm, and fruit tree orchard for 20 years, (Charles Collier helped Georgia O'Keeffe find the hacienda in Abiquiú, New Mexico, that Chabot would restore.) From 1941 to 1944, Chabot spent the summer and fall of each year at O'Keeffe's house on the Ghost Ranch, where she managed the ranch. During the winter and spring, Chabot returned to San Antonio. She camped with O'Keeffe in northern New Mexico and was captured in Maria goes to a Party, one of O'Keeffe's paintings of their trips. Chabot 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."

Chabot and O'Keeffe kept up an extensive correspondence. In her later years, Chabot assembled a manuscript containing her correspondence with O'Keeffe and photographs, but she did not complete the project in her lifetime. When she died, the materials were transferred to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center. The book Maria Chabot—Georgia O'Keeffe: Correspondence 1941–1949 was published in 2004.

Later years and death In 1961, Chabot married Dana K. Bailey, a radio astronomer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The marriage lasted only six months; Chabot 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 elderly mother.

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