It looks like wet clay waiting to be shaped, like it would yield to a thumb pressed against it. The church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Ranchos de Taos dates back to the 1770s. 20th-century photographers Paul Strand and Ansel Adams made it famous, but it is Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings that we most remember. O'Keeffe painted the church's soft geometric masses using delicious color gradations with almost no hard edges. It seems one with the earth from which it rises.

The actual church’s adobe is made from earth, dried in the sun, with a coating of mud re-applied by hand every year to prevent it from deteriorating. A 1967 attempt at repair using more modern materials—cinderblock, hard plaster—nearly destroyed the church from damp trapped inside the walls, and the traditional earthen materials and techniques were restored. Today, in a celebrated annual summer ritual, the community manually re-applies adobe mud to the church. One deacon said of the project, “This church is very picky. She has a lot of needs. She requires certain things, and not everything works.”

O’Keeffe herself was famously reclusive, a protective guardian of her legacy who resisted assumptions about what her art “meant.” The artist whose distinct painterly vocabulary made her a star in her lifetime also required certain things—privacy, solitude, nature—and not everything worked for her. Both O’Keeffe and the church she painted demanded a certain way of being handled, of being seen.

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Links:

• Throwing mud: Enjarre resumes at historic Ranchos church – Olivia Lewis, Taos News, September 10, 2025

  
  

• San Francisco de Assisi Mission Church, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico – National Park Service

  
  

• Revisiting an Icon: Ranchos de Taos Church, New Mexico – Brad Nixon, Under Western Skies, December 12, 2016

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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