Vertical depiction of two black buildings on either side of work in foreground; left building has gray band running vertically from top to bottom; right building has narrower gray line beige at top becoming gray; background has silhouetted stepped white building on right of center; between buildings is blue ground with 4 stars in center top and hazy full moon in lower 1/8 of center.

Insight

Career

Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks,” an Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago

September 11, 2024

Hear from Annelise K. Madsen, Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Associate Curator, Arts of the Americas, for a discussion on Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks”, an exhibition currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In November 1924, Georgia O’Keeffe moved into the Shelton Hotel, then the tallest residential skyscraper in the world. The building’s stunning views inspired the artist to explore the soaring geometries of midtown Manhattan in paintings, pastels, and drawings. The current exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago gathers together for the first time a major constellation of O’Keeffe’s city pictures—works that she called “my New Yorks”—and, equally important, presents them in relation to the great variety of aesthetic experimentation that characterized her mode of making during this crucial period in the mid-1920s into the 1930s.

Learn more from the show’s curator about these urban works and how they connect deeply with O’Keeffe’s broader innovative approach to modernist painting. Whether representing flowers, shells, or skyscrapers, the artist manipulated scale, abstracted form, explored color, and worked serially in daring compositions that brought her both fame and financial security in the 1920s and set the stage for her long, successful career.

Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” | The Art Institute of Chicago, June 2–September 22, 2024. High Museum of Art, October 25, 2024–February 16, 2025

—

This talk was recorded as part of our free ‘Mornings With O’Keeffe’ lecture series on the first Wednesday of every month.

About the Speaker:

Annelise K. Madsen, Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Associate Curator, Arts of the Americas, joined the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and specializes in US painting, sculpture, and visual culture. She is particularly interested in elevating historical women artists—studying artworks in the permanent collection, stewarding acquisitions, developing exhibitions and programming, and presenting new research to recover and revalue the contributions and stories of female makers. Her current exhibition project is Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” (opening June 2024). She is also preparing an exhibition on Mary Cassatt. Madsen curated and authored John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age (2018) and has co-curated and contributed to several other exhibitions and publications at the Art Institute. Additionally, she has contributed essays to such publications as Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (2011), American Art, and Winterthur Portfolio. Madsen holds a PhD in art history from Stanford University and a BA from Washington University in St. Louis.

Related Insights