The growing collection of materials at the Michael S. Engl Family Foundation Research Center Library and its archives supports advanced research on Georgia O’Keeffe and American Modernism (1890s to the present). It currently consists of books, periodicals, auction catalogs, vertical files, audiotapes, videos, and CDs; as well as materials from The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, The William Innes Homer Collection, and Maria Chabot Archives. The Library’s goals are to develop resources for the study of American Modernism (1890s to the present), and it is actively pursuing the documentation of American Modernist art, architecture, design, photography, music and literature. Of primary importance are materials and research on Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, the Stieglitz Circle artists, and O’Keeffe’s contemporaries; as well as developments in American and European Modernism from the 1890s to the present.
The Library’s mission is to support the Museum staff in its curatorial and administrative research, to support the Research Center Scholarship Program, and to support the information needs of the scholarly community.
The Michael S. Engl Family Foundation Research Center Library is a non-circulating research library. Qualified researchers are welcome by advance appointment only. Interested researchers should submit the application for access form.
Library Archives
Archival material in the Research Center includes institutional files relating to the museum's history, as well as documents relating to Georgia O'Keeffe and her contemporaries such as oral histories, correspondence, and photographs.
For further information, please consult our policies and procedures.
The William Innes Homer Collection Archive
In 2004 the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center acquired an extensive archival collection from Professor William Innes Homer, one of America's most important and well-known scholars of American art. Homer received his doctoral degree in art history from Harvard in 1961, and after teaching at Princeton and Cornell, joined the faculty at the University of Delaware, where he played a major role in developing one of America's most distinguished art history programs. While at Delaware, he was chair of the art history department from 1966-93 and was named the H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Art History in 1984.
Before retiring in 2000, Homer was the curator of many exhibitions, such as Avant-Garde Painting and Sculpture in America, 1910–25 (1975); The Symbolism of Light: The Photographs of Clarence H. White (1977); and The Photo-Secession: The Golden Age of Pictorial Photography in America (1983–84). He also wrote numerous books and exhibition catalogues, such as Robert Henri and His Circle (1969); Alfred Stieglitz and the American Avant-Garde (1977); Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession (1983); Albert Pinkham Ryder: Painter of Dreams (with Lloyd Goodrich, 1989); Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art (1992); and The Language of Contemporary Criticism Clarified (1999). The research for these and many other projects Homer carried out during his eminent career—as well as numerous photographs, rare exhibition brochures, correspondence, and other documents—will soon be available for other scholars to consult at the Research Center.
Maria Chabot Archive
In 2001, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center received as a bequest from the Estate of Maria Chabot the hundreds of letters she received from Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz between 1941 and O'Keeffe's death in 1986. Most of the letters date from the 1940s and describe the experiences Chabot and O'Keeffe shared during the years Chabot lived with O'Keeffe at the artist's Ghost Ranch house (1941-44) and oversaw the renovation of the ruined adobe hacienda that O'Keeffe purchased in 1945 in the village of Abiquiu (1946-49). Most of O'Keeffe's letters to Chabot were written from New York, and because the artist corresponded frequently from New York only with Chabot, her letters are a rich and unique resource of information about the artist's thoughts and feelings about her daily life there.
These materials are housed in the Maria Chabot Archive at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center. The archive also includes: photocopies of letters Chabot wrote O'Keeffe and Stieglitz; Chabot's extensive correspondence dating from 1933 to 2001 with colleagues, family, and friends; more than 60 drafts or completed short stories, novels, and non-fiction materials that Chabot generated over the years, along with rejection letters she received from publishers; copies of the published articles on Indian arts and crafts that she wrote in the 1930s; documents, notes, photographs, records, and reports she generated when attending conferences, taking courses, and working on various projects; diaries and travel diaries; family albums, histories, photographs, and records; books, newspaper and magazine clippings; audio tapes and written documents generated in preparation for a book of the correspondence between Chabot, O'Keeffe, and Stieglitz, which was published in 2003, two years after Chabot's death: Maria Chabot/Georgia O'Keeffe: Correspondence, 1941-1949, edited by Barbara Buhler Lynes and Ann Paden.
The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation Archive
These materials include an extensive archive of original documents and photocopies of documents dating from the late 1890s to 1986 that were in O’Keeffe’s possession at the time of her death. These include personal and professional correspondence as well as an extensive collection of photographs of and by O’Keeffe. These materials are being processed.
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