Past Event

Talks

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Radical Abstraction

  • Wednesday, January 11
  • 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM MT
  • Online

This event is free to attend. Please register in advance. Please email [email protected] or call 505.946.1000 for assistance with event registration.

Georgia O’Keeffe wrote “I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me,” explaining her early work in abstraction. While artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, and others are often identified with some of the earliest experiments in abstraction, O’Keeffe was simultaneously creating abstract drawings she called “Specials” while she worked isolated from the larger art world as an art teacher, first in South Carolina and then in west Texas. Her early explorations of abstraction carried through her work for the rest of her life, even in works with recognizable subjects, through framing, magnification, and simplification. In this talk, curator Ariel Plotek will examine Georgia O’Keeffe’s long relationship with abstraction in her work, and will discuss the museum’s exhibition on the subject: Radical Abstraction, which opened at the museum in December 2022.

This event was re-scheduled to Wednesday, January 11, 2023.

About the speaker

Ariel Plotek is Curator of Fine Art at the Georgia O’Keeffe. Among his recent projects are Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life Well Lived, an installation of photographs taken in 1977 by Malcolm Varon, and an exhibition in the museum’s Contemporary Voices series that paired paintings by Josephine Halvorson (the museum’s first artist in residence) with works by Georgia O’Keeffe.

Upcoming Events

A photograph of two people taken from behind, they are standing close together looking at O’Keeffe’s painting ‘Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico / Out Back of Marie’s II’ in the Museum galleries.

Past Event Community Events

Second Sunday: Free for NM Residents

Santa Fe, NM

Sunday, December 10

10:00am

Photograph of an interior courtyard with a dark door on the right and square opening on the left with beams above. In the courtyard is the top of a circular well and a small trees. The entire space is covered in white snow.

Past Event Family Fun Day

Family Fun Day: Snow Place Like Home

217 Johnson Street, Santa Fe, NM

Sunday, December 10

10:30am

The painting features an abstract composition of squiggly lines radiating out from the bottom left hand order of the charcoal painting.

Event Classes

Online Class: Charcoal Abstractions–Landscapes of the Mind

Online

Monday, December 11

10:00am