“Music…as Something for the Eye”

Join Dr. Janet Revell Barrett, Professor Emerita of Music Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Yaritza Martinez Pule, Curatorial Assistant, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, for a conversation on Georgia O’Keeffe’s artistic relationship with music. 

Georgia O’Keeffe’s interest in music was cultivated in her childhood and expressed throughout her life. She explored imaginative relationships of art and music in her paintings, in correspondence with other artists, and through reflection on formative moments in her education. One such moment can be traced to the time O’Keeffe heard music pouring from mentor Alon Bement’s art studio at Columbia University, prompting her realization that “music could be translated into something for the eye.” For O’Keeffe, music offered possibilities for discovering new shapes, lines, and rhythms. This talk will focus on her early fascination with music and how she drew from its abstract sounds to express visual forms.

About the Speakers:

Dr. Janet Revell Barrett is the Marilyn Pflederer Zimmerman Endowed Chair Emerita in Music Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she has taught courses for undergraduate and graduate students in music education. An early encounter at age sixteen with O’Keeffe’s Blue and Green Music, 1921 at the Art Institute of Chicago awakened her lifelong quest to explore art inspired by music and music inspired by art. She has encouraged music teachers to travel across this bridge of inspiration as they create educational experiences for their students, valuing the ways that the study of music is complemented by engagement with other art forms, history, and culture. Barrett’s recent book fosters this approach to curricular exploration across the arts, Seeking Connections: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Music Teaching and Learning.

Yaritza Martinez Pule joined the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in 2022 as Curatorial Assistant after completing a Fulbright research grant. Previously, she was a curatorial research fellow at Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City and a curatorial assistant at 80WSE Gallery, a gallery affiliated with New York University where she co-curated and organized exhibitions with the Institute of Fine Arts, the Costume Institute, and Steinhardt’s Department of Art. In addition, she was a visiting scholar in the archives at Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. She holds an MA from New York University in Visual Culture and Costume Studies where she concentrated her research on the historical and cultural dimensions of textiles and costumes, and a BA from Marquette University with a focus on Art History, Digital Media Studies, and Spanish and Latin American Studies, completing a part of her art history education from King’s College London.