Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities

May 23, 2008 - September 07, 2008
Anne Hammond, Guest Curator

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The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is pleased to present Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities, an exhibition that brings together, for the first time, approximately 97 works by two of America’s best-known artists. The exhibition demonstrates the Museum’s ongoing commitment to presenting O’Keeffe’s work together with that of her contemporaries, and to defining her achievement within the context of American Modernism (1890s–present).

O’Keeffe and Adams met in Taos, New Mexico, in 1929, an encounter that initiated a lifelong friendship. In 1933, Adams traveled for the first time from California to New York, where he met O’Keeffe’s husband, Alfred Stieglitz, the éminence grise of American Modernist photography. The three became friends, and on subsequent trips to New York, Adams always visited and spent time with Stieglitz and O’Keeffe.

Adams and O’Keeffe shared a profound appreciation of the natural world. In 1937, they traveled with other friends to explore sites in the Southwest, and in 1938, O’Keeffe and others joined Adams for a pack trip in the Yosemite High Sierra. O’Keeffe and Adams wrote one another from time to time, and portions of Adams’s last visit with O’Keeffe, at her Abiquiu house in 1981, were included in Ansel Adams: Photographer (1981), a documentary film of his life and art.

During their lifetimes, O’Keeffe and Adams became two of America’s most celebrated icons. This exhibition—the first exploration of these artists together and of the significance of their achievements in capturing the reality and essence of the world around them—clarifies the various parallels between their distinctive visions of the natural world.

Anne Hammond, an Honorary Research Scholar at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s Research Center in 2001 and a specialist in the work of Ansel Adams, is the exhibition’s guest curator. Little, Brown, and Company has published the exhibition catalogue, which includes essays by: journalist Richard B. Woodard; Sandra Phillips, Senior Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Barbara Buhler Lynes, Curator, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and the Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.

Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities was organized by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

  Lead National Sponsor

This exhibition has been made possible in part by the MetLife Foundation, the exhibition’s Lead National Sponsor, The Henry Luce Foundation, and The Burnett Foundation. Additional support for this exhibition and for related programs has been received from The Annenberg Foundation, The Kerr Foundation, the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission 1% Lodgers’ Tax, New Mexico Arts (a Division of the Department of Cultural Affairs), JP Morgan Chase Foundation, William Randolph Hearst Foundation, the Kaiserman-Robinson Family, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s National Council, and Members of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.