Skulls of the Southwest

Photo by Lisa E White

Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hiils by Georgia O'Keeffe via nytimes.com

Skulls symbolize the Southwestern desert.  Imagine a cartoon with a man crawling through the arid desert, saguaro and skull in the background, confirming his dire situation.  The skull above is a work of art by itself, hanging outside the Bischoff's Fine Art Gallery in Old Town.  Skulls of rams, cattle, antelope and deer are familiar in Arizona art, and human skulls are icons of Mexican Art.   Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the most famous Southwestern artists, shocked the world when she switched from flowers to skull and bones paintings.  She loved the holes and smooth curves of the bone as well as the American iconography of the image of a skull, and she frequently juxtaposed them next to a flower, giving them a surrealist quality.  "Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished."-- Georgia O'Keeffe.