Herman Miller will debut a furniture collection inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexico home on May 20th. “The New Mexico Collection” launches alongside the NYCxDESIGN festival and features two limited-run pieces produced inspired by O’Keeffe’s creative exchanges with Alexander and Susan Girard, as well as Charles and Ray Eames. This collection is launched in partnership with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
O’Keeffe moved permanently to Abiquiú, New Mexico, in 1949. She transformed a crumbling adobe compound into a spare, light-filled home that reflected both the surrounding landscape and her own modernist taste. O’Keeffe filled the space with natural materials—bones, stones, and weathered wood—alongside contemporary furniture by designers she knew personally, including the Girard and Eames families. Girard advised her on interiors; the Eameses gifted her a low-slung upholstered chair after she admired a similar version in the Girards’s Santa Fe home.
As part of the new Herman Miller collection, a fully upholstered Eames Wire Chair Low Base, designed by the Eames Office, revives the prototype that was given to O’Keeffe. The new edition includes a white wire frame and base with partial “bikini” upholstery in Girard’s Toostripe textile in ochre and sienna. The chair will be produced in an edition of 300, with 250 chairs available in North America—for $1,995 apiece—and 50 in Japan.
The second piece, the Girard Snake Table, will bring to life a concept Girard never realized. The designer’s snake motif appeared in several of the pieces in O’Keeffe’s home. The table features a white enamel steel top printed with Girard’s black snake motif, mounted on a splayed-leg aluminum base. It will be available in a limited run of 100, with 90 tables—priced at $895 apiece—in North America and 10 in Japan. The collection is officially launching at 12 p.m. EST on May 20th.
Herman Miller is staging a preview of both designs, along with archival photography taken by Girard and Charles Eames during their visits to O’Keeffe’s Abiquiú home, at its New York store at 251 Park Avenue South. The first 100 visitors to the store on May 20th at 10 a.m. will receive a bandana inspired by the Girard snake motif.
