This image shows a painting which is framed in a pigmented pastel yellow panel that includes fragments of earth and rocks from the sites where the paintings were made. The painting memorializes a wooden painted sign from an abandoned church near the town of Abiquiu. The top 1/3 of the painting consists of a register of brown-beige swatches of paint with darker brown hashmarks and squiggly lines revealing sections of peeling paint. The words, La Santa Rosa De Lima are written in an arc across the top, in large yellow letters in curled quick short yellow and brown strokes, with the words Scared Site painted in the same manner below. The bottom 2/3rds of painting consists of a field of white peeling paint, composed of gray hash marks, linear marks and pinky-brown scribbles showing abrasions and losses. A wide blue line of hash marks dissects the painting diagonally from the bottom center to upper right corner. In the center of the composition is a large yellow cross outlined in pink hash marks. Superimposed, like a cross, over the entire image is a vertical metal linked chain and a horizonal piece of barbed wire. The sign appears to be propped up on the dirt as there are 3 stones on the bottom of the picture plane, a small yellowish one to the left and to the right a medium size blueish-gray stone and another one partially visible in the right-hand corner.

Sacred Site Sign

ArtistJosephine Halvorson
Year2020
Dimensions32 x 32 inches (81.3 x 81.3 cm)
MediumGouache and site material on panels
CreditCourtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Santa Rosa de Lima, near the present-day town of Abiquiú, was settled by the Spanish in the eighteenth century, and abandoned in the 1930s—around the time when O’Keeffe first settled in New Mexico, and began painting the crosses she encountered in the landscape. Today, the ghost town of Santa Rosa de Lima includes the substantial ruins of an adobe church, which the illusionistically painted sign in this work designates.