The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe honors the artist’s passion for good tea with a custom blend that is reminiscent of the tea she drank in her Abiquiu home and studio.
Text and Photography by Bruce Richardson
I often receive requests from art museums to design custom tea blends based upon art in their collections. One of my favorite commissions was for American artist Georgia O’Keeffe. Not only was I inspired by her incredible paintings of the New Mexico desert, I also discovered her deep appreciation of tea.
I visited the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe soon after it opened in 1995. Later, I had opportunities to enter her home and studio in the desert village of Abiquiu, where I felt a sense of harmony as I walked through her simple adobe rooms. The colors, textures, and her use of space reminded me of the feeling I often get when entering a Japanese tea house.
The home remains as she left it when she died in 1986. Even the shelves of her walk-through pantry still contain the kitchen staples and equipment—including teapots—she had assembled. Many of the glass jars had been hand-labeled by O’Keeffe. I was fascinated to see the beans, rice, sugar, and other ingredients she used daily. Eventually, I spotted a Mason jar with the word TEA written on it.
“Look!” I whispered to my wife, Shelley. “Georgia was a tea drinker.”
But I was even more excited when I saw a neighboring jar bearing the label GOOD TEA. That discovery gave me insight into the life of O’Keeffe because, like many of us who follow the “way of tea,” she realized that, yes, there is tea, but your life can change when you recognize good tea.
I later shared this story during a lecture at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. The staff then asked me to design a line of teas for their gift shop. So, of course, we called the series of three tea blends “GOOD TEA.”
I’ve told this story countless times at tea events across North America. Audiences always respond with an appreciative laugh when they realize they share a common bond with America’s pre-eminent 20th-century female artist. We teaists are bound together through “the cup of humanity,” a term coined by Okakura Kakuzo, author of The Book of Tea, and we can recognize good tea!
This ah-ha moment of tea enlightenment is usually not a sudden conversion. Instead, it might evolve through serendipitous events that teach us the way of tea, or Chado. These moments might include a memorable afternoon tea in a London hotel, a quiet teatime with a friend, the discovery of an exquisite single-garden tea, or a tea-tasting class led by a team mentor. Once we become attuned to the culture of good tea and the joy of our tea journey, we find it impossible to drink anything less.
How can we discover the taste of good tea?
I suggest you start your explorations with tea purveyors who value quality over quantity. These tea merchants are glad to answer your questions and provide suggestions that will hone your tasting skills. They will introduce you to specialty teas from single gardens or specific growing regions, such as Darjeeling, Uji, or Anhui. Be sure to taste those teas with friends and share the flavors and aromas you discover. Soon, you will be able to identify the flavor profiles for various tea regions, and the unique temperatures for white, green, oolong, and black teas will become second nature to your steeping ritual. It won’t be long before you realize that tea is not just a commodity; it’s a lifestyle.
Until then, go forth and make good tea!
Contributing editor Bruce Richardson is the Master Tea Blender at Elmwood Inn Fine Teas and co-author of The New Tea Companion and A Social History of Tea, available at elmwoodinn.com.
