O'Keeffiana
Art and Art Materials
September 24, 2010 - May 08, 2011

Exhibition organized by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

In creating her extraordinary body of pictures, Georgia O’Keeffe developed an intimate knowledge of the artistic materials, objects, and places that informed her work on a daily basis. "O’Keeffiana: Art and Art Materials" will explore O’Keeffe’s material world through a rich selection of her works in various media – watercolor, charcoal, graphite, and oil – along with a sampling of the objects and artistic materials that she used and lived with.

The exhibition will shed new light on O’Keeffe’s imaginative and technical processes by showing how she studied the abstract properties of objects she admired, developing favorite visual motifs while investigating the unique qualities of her respective media. An artist keenly attuned to her tools, techniques, and surroundings, O’Keeffe demonstrated unusual knowledge of her materials and the wider world around her. As the artist said in 1945, "One paints what is around." Elaborating on that point in 1976, O’Keeffe observed "I have picked flowers where I found them, have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood where there were sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood that I liked. When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home too. I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it." The exhibition will invite viewers to experience that sense of wideness and wonder by displaying some of the very rocks, bones, and other found objects that O’Keeffe considered beautiful in relation to her pictures of the places from which they came.

Drawing upon familiar works by the artist as well as many that have rarely been exhibited, "O’Keeffiana: Art and Art Materials" promises to delight and illuminate both enthusiasts of the artist and newcomers to her achievement – an achievement that grew directly out of her material environment. In a world that seems increasingly virtual, or marked by indirect experience, O’Keeffe’s art provides a vivid reminder of the value of intimate knowledge about "what is around," about "the wideness and wonder of the world" we live in.