Georgia O'Keeffe

(American, 1887–1986)

Georgia O'Keeffe was a seminal American artist known for her oil paintings of animal skulls and flowers. Characterized by their sophisticated gradations of tone and color, O’Keeffe’s works are often lauded for their female perspective and iconic aura. “Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know,” she once said. “I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower—and what is my experience if it is not the color?” Born on November 15, 1887 in Sun Prairie, WI, she studied first at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, then under William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League, and finally with Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia University Teacher’s College. Briefly working as an elementary school art teacher in New York, she was given her first solo exhibition by the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz in 1916. Stieglitz and O’Keefe went on to wed in 1924, through her husband she was introduced to several American Modernists, including Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Paul Strand, and Edward Steichen. Having mainly focused her gaze on the architecture of New York for the past decade, her interests shifted abruptly after her first trip to New Mexico in 1929. Falling in love with the scenic beauty and culture of the Southwest, over the following decades, she made annual visits to New Mexico, before moving permanently to a place called Ghost Ranch in 1949. O’Keeffe was inducted into the American Academy of Arts of Letters in 1962 and received the National Medal of Arts in 1985. She died at the age of 98 on March 6, 1986 in Santa Fe, NM. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others.