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Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition to debut at the Brooklyn Museum

A New Look at the Iconic American Artist’s Life and Works

February 10, 2017 By John Alexander Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Ansel Adams (American, 1902–1984). Georgia O’Keeffe, Carmel Highlands, California, 1981. Gelatin silver print, 10 1/8 x 13 1/8 inches (25.7 x 33.3 centimeters). Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Gift of Juan and Anna Marie Hamilton, 2003.03.08. © 2016 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
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“Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern” will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, from March 3 to July 23.  It will be the first exhibition to examine the renowned artist’s self-crafted persona. The exhibit offers a new look at the iconic American artist’s powerful ownership of her identity as an artist and a woman. The public will see how O’Keeffe crafted herself through her art, her dress and her progressive and independent lifestyle.

O’Keeffe, born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, is one of the most well-known American painters and considered by some to be the foremother of the feminist art movement. She worked in a discipline dominated by male artists, critics, gallery owners and curators who were critical of female artists. She launched a successful career, developing a unique painting style.  Her life experiences influenced her art, as did her living in New York and New Mexico.

O’Keeffe was raised on a farm in Wisconsin and took art lessons from a young age. Encouraged by her teachers, she graduated high school with the goal of becoming an artist.  She attended the Art Institute of Chicago for one year and studied at the Art Students League in New York City, where the emphasis was on realism, an artistic method representing people, places and things as true to their appearance.

In 1908 she won the William Merritt Chase still life prize for her painting “Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot).” While working as an art teacher in South Carolina in 1915, O’Keeffe began a series of abstract charcoal paintings that would launch her artistic career, including one of her most famous, “Drawing XIII.”

In 1918 O’Keeffe moved to New York where she fell in love with Alfred Stieglitz, a celebrated photographer and gallery owner. They married in 1924 and lived in New York. In 1929 O’Keeffe began spending summers in New Mexico, which would ultimately become her permanent residence and influence much of her art.

During their marriage, the well-connected Stieglitz promoted her work, particularly the close-ups of flowers that she began producing in the mid 1920s. She had numerous gallery exhibitions, and her retrospective “Paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe” opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 1927.

As much as Stieglitz influenced O’Keeffe, she inspired him to create a series of photographs of her, many of them nudes, which were widely exhibited. He died in 1946, and three years later O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico.

She was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1977, as well as the National Medal of Arts in 1985. Although her poor eyesight forced her to stop painting in the 1970s, she continued to work in pencil, watercolor and clay until her health worsened in 1984. She died in 1986 at the age of 98.

On view through July 23, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern” is part of “A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum,” a yearlong project celebrating a decade of feminist thinking.

In addition to a number of O’Keeffe’s key paintings and never-before-exhibited selections from her wardrobe, the exhibition will also feature portraits of her by renowned photographers such as Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Todd Webb, Bruce Weber and Annie Leibovitz.

Lisa Small, curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum, serves as the exhibition’s in-house coordinator.

“This exhibition reveals O’Keeffe’s commitment to core principles associated with modernism — minimalism, seriality, simplification — not only in her art, but also in her distinctive style of dress,” Small explained.

 

For more information, visit brooklynmuseum.org

 

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