Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 17, 2009 – January 17, 2010
The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., February 6, 2010 – May 9, 2010
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, May 28, 2010 – September 12, 2010

The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Phillips Collection, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum are jointly organizing O’Keeffe and Abstraction, the first exhibition to focus comprehensively on Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstractions over the course of her career. There have been many exhibitions devoted to O’Keeffe’s art that have either surveyed her entire career or examined different aspects of her subject matter. Unlike those, this project aims to clarify the origins and range of O'Keeffe's radical and singular abstract invention and to illuminate the subjective approach to subject matter that underlay all her work, whether overtly representational or explicitly abstract. By exploring the particular nature of O’Keeffe’s abstraction and the aesthetic climate in which it developed, this exhibition returns us to a clearer understanding of the origins of modernist abstraction and the heady euphoria that surrounded the first steps artists took into this unchartered aesthetic territory.

O’Keeffe and Abstraction will include approximately 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors by O'Keeffe as well as selected examples of Alfred Stieglitz’s portrait series of O’Keeffe, which reinforced her understanding of photography’s abstracting possibilities while also influencing early critical reception of her art. The exhibition is being organized by Barbara Haskell, Project Director and Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art; Barbara Buhler Lynes, the Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, Santa Fe; Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Guest Curator, The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; and Bruce Robertson, consulting curator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by the organizers, excerpts from the recently unsealed Stieglitz-O’Keeffe correspondence, and a chronology of the exhibition history of O’Keeffe’s abstractions annotated by her public statements on her art.