Bank of America Names Georgia O’Keeffe Museum as a 2019 Grant Winner
The Museum will use the Art Conservation Project grant to conserve
the artist’s iconic painting Spring.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—October 17, 2019 (Santa Fe, NM)— The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
is honored to be a 2019 recipient of Bank of America’s Art Conservation Project Grant. The
award will support conservation of the pivotal Georgia O’Keeffe painting, Spring.
“We are so grateful for Bank of America’s generosity. It gives us the ability to best repair and
protect this important work in Georgia O’Keeffe’s history,” says Dale Kronkright, the Georgia
O’Keeffe Museum’s Head of Conservation. “This grant from Bank of America will not only support our research and conservation of the painting, it will enable us to share our work online and with related public programs. We will better understand Spring‘s creation, and share it with new audiences around the world.”
Painted in 1948, Spring marks a turning point in Georgia O’Keeffe’s personal and artistic lives. Her husband, famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz, died in 1946. For three years, she suspended her regular trips to New Mexico, staying in New York to settle his estate. Spring is one of her few creations from that transitional period. Measuring 7-by-4 feet, it was her largest landscape to date, and combined her most iconic New Mexican subjects: flowers, antlers, a bone, and the flat-top mountain Cerro Pedernal.
The conservation work will address cracks, flaking paints, and darkening surface stains. The painting also has a history of water damage caused by a leak in the ceiling of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abiquiú home. The conservation and research into the painting’s past treatments are expected to take about a year to complete.
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is one of 22 major art restoration projects from 9 countries and
12 U.S. cities and territories that will be funded by an Art Conservation Project Grant.
The recipients are historically and culturally significant works in danger of deterioration that will
benefit from the award. Bank of America established the Art Conservation Project ten years ago.
It is a key element of Bank of America’s program of arts support worldwide, and part of the
company’s environmental, social, and governance program.
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is also a participant in Bank of America’s Museums on Us
program. Museums on Us provides free admission to Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and US Trust card holders at more than 200 participating cultural institutions across the US during the first weekend of each month.
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum will announce public events related to Spring’s conservation in
2020.
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ABOUT THE GEORGIA O’KEEFFE MUSEUM: Since 1997, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has
shared the art, life, and story of Georgia O’Keeffe with visitors from around the world. Located in
New Mexico, where Georgia O’Keeffe lived the final decades of her life, the O’Keeffe has sites
and experiences in two historic destinations, Santa Fe and Abiquiú. For more information, please visit okeeffemuseum.org
