Discover Georgia O’ Keeffe’s artistic legacy, her life and American modernism through the Museum’s permanent collection and special exhibitions of works by O’Keeffe as well as that of her contemporaries and living artists of distinction.
The Georgia O’ Keeffe Museum Collection
When the Museum opened its doors in 1997, its permanent collection was comprised of around 100 works including 94, the largest group of works by Georgia O’ Keeffe. Over the years, the collection has significantly grown with the support of The Burnett Foundation, individual donors and works by a number of O’ Keeffe’s contemporaries. The collection’s greatest expanse occurred in 2006 when The Georgia O’ Keeffe Foundation transferred its remaining artworks to the Museum. Remaining artworks included paintings, drawings, sculptures, sketches and photographs including those that documented important events in O’ Keeffe’s life, her animals, friends, New Mexico houses and other subjects she was interested in.
Additional Works
In addition to works by Georgia O’ Keeffe, the Museum has exhibited a number of works by artists whose careers either paralleled O’ Keeffe’s or who worked during periods in which O’ Keeffe was active. Such works have included paintings by Arthur Dove and Cade Wells, Kenneth Noland, Ansel Adams, Philippe Halsman, Yousuf Karsh and Eliot Porter. In 2000, personal, tangible property Georgia Keeffe owned including art materials and many objects she made the subject of her work were gifted to the Museum by Juan and Anna Marie Hamilton. A private collector gave eight works by eight different modernist artists who worked in New Mexico between 1916 and the mid-1930s to the Museum in 2005. These artists included: George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, John Marin and John Sloan.
Georgia O’ Keeffe Art and Life
Beginnings
Georgia O’ Keeffe’s bold, abstract watercolors were first exhibited in Alfred Stieglitz’s avant-garde gallery, 291 in 1916 alongside works of older, more established artists like John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and Max Weber. While not always on view, the Museum’s extensive archives and holdings include examples of abstract works by O’ Keeffe such as Anything, an oil painting on a board; Abstraction made of cast aluminium; and Black Lines, a watercolor piece on paper.
New York
O’Keeffe relocated to New York in June of 1918 and here she created some of the most remarkable abstractions of her entire career. As early as 1919; however, a new degree of precision and specificity began to characterize O’ Keeffe’s representational images, suggesting an active response to the concerns of modernist photography. In the 1920s O’ Keeffe established herself foremost as a painter of recognizable forms, for which she remains best known today. During this time her interest in modernist photography was reflected through her large-scale paintings of flowers, leafs and trees that often presented close-up views of these natural forms. Paintings of New York buildings reflected O’Keefe’s use of optical distortions that are equally derivative of photographic manipulations.
Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico
From its wide, rose-colored deserts to its high, snow-capped peaks, O’Keeffe’s love for New Mexico began during her five month visit to arts patroness Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos in 1929. While O’ Keefe’s natural and still life forms established her fame, in 1931 a new series of skull-and-bone paintings demonstrated the specific evocation of a regional sense of place in her paintings. O’Keeffe began living in New Mexico part time in 1934 and would do so for the next 15 years until making it her permanent home in 1949. In New Mexico, O’Keeffe redefined herself, her art, and her personal aesthetic as evidenced in her Abiquiú home and studio, where she created some of her most iconic works of art.
Shopping at the Georgia O’ Keeffe Museum Store
Be sure to stop by the Museum Store. Books, calendars, posters, note and post cards, CDs and DVDs, clothing and jewelry related to Georgia O’ Keeffe and her works are available to purchase.
- Non-flash photography is allowed in many areas of the Georgia O’ Keeffe Museum.
- Wheelchairs are available for use within the Museum on a first-come, first-served basis.