The O’Keeffe and Stieglitz Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago

In 1949, when Georgia O’Keeffe gave the Art Institute of Chicago a sizable part of the estate of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, she was determined to fulfill his dream to place his collection permanently in public institutions around the country. However, it was also the result of O’Keeffe’s years of association with the Art Institute, from her early education in Chicago to her first museum retrospective in 1943. This lecture, presented by Sarah Kelly Oehler, will explore O’Keeffe’s ties to Chicago and examine her extraordinary gift of paintings, drawings, and photographs that comprise one of the great collections of modern American art.

Sarah Kelly Oehler is the Field-McCormick Chair and Curator, Arts of the Americas, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her latest project was the acquisition and installation of the Hartwell Memorial Window, a monumental window by Tiffany Studios. In 2018, Oehler curated the critically acclaimed Charles White: A Retrospective, the first major retrospective of this influential African American artist in several decades. Other recent exhibitions include Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945 (2018), Whistler’s Mother: An American Icon Returns to Chicago (2017), America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s (2016), Shatter Rupture Break: The Modern Series I (2015), and They Seek a City: Chicago and the Art of Migration, 1910–1950 (2013). She has contributed to numerous other exhibitions and publications at the museum, including Whistler Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago (2020), Ivan Albright Paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago (2019), and American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago from World War I to 1955 (2009). She received her PhD in American art from Columbia University and her BA in history from Yale University.

This talk was presented on November 21, 2021 as part of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museums Mornings with O’Keeffe series.

Image: Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986). Black Cross, New Mexico, 1929. Oil on canvas; 99.1 × 76.2 cm (39 × 30 in.). Art Institute of Chicago, Art Institute Purchase Fund, 1943.95.