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Since its opening in 1997, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has received a number of works by artists whose careers either paralleled hers or who worked during periods in which O’Keeffe was active. Early on, as gifts from private collectors, we first received paintings by Authur Dove and Cade Wells, and as a gift of the artist himself, a work by Kenneth Noland. In addition, the Museum has been fortunate enough to receive as gifts works by Ansel Adams, Philippe Halsman, Yousuf Karsh, and Eliot Porter.

In 2000, the Museum received from Juan and Marie Hamilton a major gift of the personal, tangible property Georgia O’Keeffe owned, including art materials and many of the objects she made the subject of her work. The next year, the Museum received a bequest fort he Estate of Maria Chabot, O’Keeffe’s friend and associate, that included the letters O’Keeffe had written Chabot beginning in 1940 and numerous photographs Chabot made of O’Keeffe, such as the well-known one of O’Keeffe on a motorcycle.

In 2005, a private collector placed in the collection eight works by eight different modernist artists who worked in New Mexico between 1916 and the mid-1930s. These artists who were O’Keeffe’s contemporaries, are: George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, John Marin, and John Sloan. A year later, another private collector gave the Museum a painting by Oscar Bluemner.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation has been particularly generous. In honor of the Museum’s five-year anniversary, the Foundation contributed 24 photographs by Alfred Stieglitz to the collection. And, as part of its contribution of assets to the Museum in early 2006, the Foundation increased the Museum’s collection of photographs dramatically. Of the more than 1,700 photographs that came to the Museum from the Foundation at that time, about 150 are by O’Keeffe herself, while others are works well-known professionals or are snapshots taken by friend and associates.