Past Exhibitions
From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri & IrelandSeptember 23, 2011 - January 15, 2012
Robert Henri & Ireland is a major loan exhibition organized by the Mint Museum of Art and opening there in May 2011 before touring to two additional venues in 2011 and 2012. Long celebrated as the leader of the urban realists group known as “the Ashcan School,” Henri’ art has received less attention than one might expect. The few museum exhibitions that have focused solely on Henri include those organized by the Delaware Art Museum in 1984 and the Orlando Museum of Art in 1994 were retrospective in nature. Robert Henri and Ireland is the first to explore a particular component of Henri’s work, and it will make a significant contribution to scholarship in general also expand upon revisionist scholarship on the Ashcan School that was featured in Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with Leisure at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2008 and Leaving for the Country: George Bellows at Woodstock at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, in 2003. Robert Henri & Ireland is the first exhibition to present one of the most significant group of works that Henri produced: those inspired by his travels to Ireland. By bringing approximately 50 paintings of Irish subject matter drawn from public and private collections, co-curators Jonathan Stuhlman and Valerie Leeds will clarify the nature and significance of the contribution Henri made to American art as a result of his being and painting in Ireland. The appealing images of Irish people in the exhibition, and in particular Irish children, provide new information on a genre in which Henri excelled: portraiture. But they also provide a means of determining the development of his handling of paint, and his understanding of composition and color theories, and demonstrating that the paintings he produced in Ireland were among his most accomplished. |
All paintings by Robert Henri.
West Coast of Ireland, 1913 Oil on canvas, 26 x 32 inches Everson Museum of Art; Museum purchase, 58.6 My Friend Brien, 1913 Oil on canvas, 41 x 33 inches Mint Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John L. Crist, Jr. in memory of John L. Crist, Sr., 1966.14 Girl in Pink (Anne Lavelle), 1928 Oil on canvas, 28 3/8 x 20 ½ inches Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger, 1963.214.I(b).PI Her Sunday Shawl, 1924 Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 ¼ inches Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Charles G. Thalhimer in memory of his wife, Rhoda, 2003.125 Irish Boy (Thomas Cafferty), 1925 Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches Collection of Jonathan L. Cohen Mary Agnes, 1924 Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches Private collection of Tia |
 Georgia O'Keeffe, Street, New York No. 1,1926.
Oil on canvas, 48 1/8 x 29 7/8 inches. Gift of the Burnett Foundation, © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum  Andy Warhol, Jackie, 1964.
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 20 x 16 inches. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © 2010 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. |
Shared Intelligence: American Painting and the PhotographMay 20, 2011 - September 11, 2011
Curators: Jonathan Weinberg and Barbara Buhler Lynes Shared Intelligence will be the first major museum exhibition to survey the fraught but highly productive relationship of painting to photography in 20th-Century American Art. It brings together approximately 75 photographs and paintings by such artists as Robert Bechtle, Chuck Close, Thomas Eakins, Sherrie Levine, Georgia O’Keeffe, Cindy Sherman, Charles Sheeler, Ben Shahn, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz for whom the two mediums were essential to their practices. In opposition to Modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg and John Szarkowski, who have tried to establish the autonomy of painting and photography, a crucial theme of this exhibition is the way in which the two mediums have always intersected and spilled into each other. The camera has been used repeatedly to reinvigorate painting, even as photography has been frequently enriched by a dialogue with painting. Whereas in the beginning of the 20th Century photographers felt obligated to justify their use of the camera as a means of expression, today the question is no longer, can photography be the equal of painting but rather has the photograph, and photo-based images, supplanted painting’s position in the hierarchy of the art world. Certainly it is nearly impossible to imagine a contemporary artist whose work is untouched by the camera, if only as a means of reproduction. And yet the photograph’s role in modern art goes far beyond reproduction or even as a source of subject matter. Photographic seeing, the way the lens freezes, flattens, enlarges and crops the world conditions all visual representations. Above all there is no way of escaping the photographic archive, the camera’s service to the vast legal, scientific and economic systems of knowledge that categorize and regulates modern existence itself. Central to the exhibition will be the role of the crop and the close up in the modernist figurative tradition. O’Keeffe’s early work cannot be separated from the photographic practice of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz and the other photographers he represented. Her use of the close up in her paintings, while not literally based on particular photographs, responded to and influenced the photographs of Stieglitz and of Paul Strand. Certainly Stieglitz and his collaborator, Edward Steichen, were profoundly influenced by contemporary painting and collage (Steichen began his career as a painter). The exhibition will pair paintings and photographs in which the visual relationship is both compelling and intrinsic to the creative process. How did Ben Shahn translate his photographs of a store window into a painting of the same subject? What elements did David Hockney take from his photographs of pools and swimmers in order to create a painting of a boy diving into the water? How does Chuck Close obsessively grid out and copy his source material so that in the end the process itself becomes an essential part of the work’s meaning? The aggregate result of the exhibit will be to refute the idea that painting from a photograph is some sort of failure of imagination or technique—rather the two mediums enrich each other. Ultimately, the exhibition will emphasize the role of the artist as picture maker, rather than as either painter or photographer. INTELIGENCIA COMPARTIDA Inteligencia Compartida: Pintura y Fotografía Norteamericana; una exposición mayor que trata de una relación muy productiva entre la pintura y fotografía en Norte America del Siglo 20 estará expuesta en el Museo Georgia O´Keeffe a partir del día 20 de mayo hasta el 11 de septiembre 2011. Esta exposición de más de 75 pinturas y fotografías se enfoca en la obra de pintores Norte Americanos para quienes el fotografo ha sido esencial, empezando con el aclamado Thomas Eakins, realista del Siglo 19 y continúa hasta pasar por el arte contemporáneo, incluso tales artistas como Georgia O´Keeffe, Frederic Remington, Charles Sheeler, Norman Rockwell, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Chuck Close, David Hockney y Sherrie Levine. Obras importantes, fotógrafos innovadores como Eadweard Muybridge, Alfred Steiglitz, Man Ray, Edward Weston,Walker Evans y Margaret Bourke-White también se van a incluir. Conservadores son Jonathan Weinberg, Doctor en Filosofía, erudita independiente y Barbara Buhler Lynes, Conservadora, del Museo Georgia O´Keeffe y Directora del Centro de Investigaciones, Emily Fisher Landau del centro de Investigaciones de la Colección permanente del MuseoO´Keeffe también estarán expuestas durante dichas fechas. LISTEN HERE: |
 Georgia O'Keeffe, Black Place III, 1944
Oil on canvas, 36 x 40 inches. Gift of The Burnett Foundation (2007.01.026) © 1987, Private Collection |
O'Keeffiana Art and Art MaterialsSeptember 24, 2010 - May 08, 2011
Exhibition organized by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Georgia O’Keeffe led an aesthetic life of precise and specific preferences that informed her daily life as well as her artistic practice. She was discriminating about the views that became the subject of her artwork, as well as the materials and tools she used to create her extraordinary body of work. “O’Keeffiana: Art and Art Materials” offers a view of her artistic practice in a rich selection of artworks in various media – watercolor, charcoal, graphite, pastels, oil, and sculpture – along with a sampling of the pastels, watercolors, oil paints and brushes, she used. The exhibition will also include photographs of O’Keeffe at work and in the landscape that inspired her, and a selection of the stones and bones she collected and represented in paint and sculpture. The exhibition will shed new light on O’Keeffe’s imaginative and technical processes by showing how she studied the abstract properties of objects she admired, developing favorite visual motifs while investigating the unique qualities of her respective media. An artist keenly attuned to her tools, techniques, and surroundings, O’Keeffe demonstrated unusual knowledge of her materials and the wider world around her. As the artist said in 1945, “One paints what is around.” Elaborating on that point in 1976, O’Keeffe observed “I have picked flowers where I found them, have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood where there were sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood that I liked. When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home too. I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.” The exhibition invites viewers to experience that sense of wideness and wonder by displaying some of the very rocks, bones, and other found objects that O’Keeffe considered beautiful in relation to her pictures of the places from which they came. |
Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction
This traveling exhibition is now complete.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 17, 2009 – January 17, 2010
The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., February 6, 2010 – May 9, 2010
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, May 28, 2010 – September 12, 2010
The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Phillips Collection, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum are jointly organizing Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, the first exhibition to focus comprehensively on Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstractions over the course of her career. There have been many exhibitions devoted to O’Keeffe’s art that have either surveyed her entire career or examined different aspects of her subject matter. Unlike those, this project aims to clarify the origins and range of O'Keeffe's radical and singular abstract invention and to illuminate the subjective approach to subject matter that underlay all her work, whether overtly representational or explicitly abstract. By exploring the particular nature of O’Keeffe’s abstraction and the aesthetic climate in which it developed, this exhibition returns us to a clearer understanding of the origins of modernist abstraction and the heady euphoria that surrounded the first steps artists took into this uncharted aesthetic territory.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction includes approximately 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors by O'Keeffe. The exhibition is being organized by Barbara Haskell, Project Director and Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art; Barbara Buhler Lynes, the Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, Santa Fe; Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Guest Curator, The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; and Bruce Robertson, consulting curator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by the organizers, excerpts from the recently unsealed Stieglitz-O’Keeffe correspondence, and a chronology of the exhibition history of O’Keeffe’s abstractions annotated by her public statements on her art.
During its exhibition at the Whitney in New York, "Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction" earned many accolades, including:
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 17, 2009 – January 17, 2010
The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., February 6, 2010 – May 9, 2010
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, May 28, 2010 – September 12, 2010
The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Phillips Collection, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum are jointly organizing Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, the first exhibition to focus comprehensively on Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstractions over the course of her career. There have been many exhibitions devoted to O’Keeffe’s art that have either surveyed her entire career or examined different aspects of her subject matter. Unlike those, this project aims to clarify the origins and range of O'Keeffe's radical and singular abstract invention and to illuminate the subjective approach to subject matter that underlay all her work, whether overtly representational or explicitly abstract. By exploring the particular nature of O’Keeffe’s abstraction and the aesthetic climate in which it developed, this exhibition returns us to a clearer understanding of the origins of modernist abstraction and the heady euphoria that surrounded the first steps artists took into this uncharted aesthetic territory.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction includes approximately 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors by O'Keeffe. The exhibition is being organized by Barbara Haskell, Project Director and Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art; Barbara Buhler Lynes, the Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, Santa Fe; Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Guest Curator, The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; and Bruce Robertson, consulting curator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by the organizers, excerpts from the recently unsealed Stieglitz-O’Keeffe correspondence, and a chronology of the exhibition history of O’Keeffe’s abstractions annotated by her public statements on her art.
During its exhibition at the Whitney in New York, "Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction" earned many accolades, including:
- Time Magazine's Top 10 Art Exhibitions of 2009
- The New Yorker Magazine's Best Museum Shows of 2009
- Art + Auction's 2009 Power Exhibitions
Susan Rothberg: Moving in Place
Susan Rothenberg, Red, 2008.
Oil on canvas, Private Collection
Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York
Oil on canvas, Private Collection
Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York
January 22, 2010 - May 16, 2010
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth are co-organizing an exhibition of the work of Susan Rothenberg, one of America’s best-known living artists, who, like Georgia O’Keeffe, left New York at mid-career to make New Mexico her primary residence. Each has established a significant place and artistic identity in the American Southwest, an area initially defined as a male domain in that the majority of its early Anglo visitors and inhabitants -- explorers, ethnographers, photographers, traders, cattle ranchers, and cowboys -- were men. O’Keeffe and Rothenberg also have achieved a place of prominence as painters in the larger American art community that has historically privileged the work of male painters. And, each has created imagery that has become iconic – O’Keeffe in her depictions of inanimate natural forms (flowers, bones, and landscape configurations) and Rothenberg with in her presentation of the horse, a subject with strong, gendered associations with the American West. Moreover, in creating work that addresses and synthesizes the opposing forces of abstraction and representation, each artist has significantly changed and advanced the dialogue between these two polarities of artistic expression that in one way or another characterize major developments in American art since the early years of the twentieth century.
Michael Auping, Chief Curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth will be the curator for a small, focused exhibition of approximately 10 to 12 Rothenberg works that elucidates specific aspects of the issues outlined above, an exhibition that will open at the Modern Art Museum in 2010 or 2011 and then be on view at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum as part of the institution’s “Living Artists of Distinction” series. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue that will include essays by Auping and Barbara Buhler Lynes, Chief Curator, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Auping’s essay will explore the thematic unity and iconic character of Rothenberg’s work, while the essay by Lynes will speak to the relationship between the work and life of these two American artists and the gender issues that their imagery and presence in the American Southwest raise.
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth are co-organizing an exhibition of the work of Susan Rothenberg, one of America’s best-known living artists, who, like Georgia O’Keeffe, left New York at mid-career to make New Mexico her primary residence. Each has established a significant place and artistic identity in the American Southwest, an area initially defined as a male domain in that the majority of its early Anglo visitors and inhabitants -- explorers, ethnographers, photographers, traders, cattle ranchers, and cowboys -- were men. O’Keeffe and Rothenberg also have achieved a place of prominence as painters in the larger American art community that has historically privileged the work of male painters. And, each has created imagery that has become iconic – O’Keeffe in her depictions of inanimate natural forms (flowers, bones, and landscape configurations) and Rothenberg with in her presentation of the horse, a subject with strong, gendered associations with the American West. Moreover, in creating work that addresses and synthesizes the opposing forces of abstraction and representation, each artist has significantly changed and advanced the dialogue between these two polarities of artistic expression that in one way or another characterize major developments in American art since the early years of the twentieth century.
Michael Auping, Chief Curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth will be the curator for a small, focused exhibition of approximately 10 to 12 Rothenberg works that elucidates specific aspects of the issues outlined above, an exhibition that will open at the Modern Art Museum in 2010 or 2011 and then be on view at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum as part of the institution’s “Living Artists of Distinction” series. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue that will include essays by Auping and Barbara Buhler Lynes, Chief Curator, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Auping’s essay will explore the thematic unity and iconic character of Rothenberg’s work, while the essay by Lynes will speak to the relationship between the work and life of these two American artists and the gender issues that their imagery and presence in the American Southwest raise.
New Mexico and New York: Photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe
October 02, 2009 - January 03, 2010
Curated by Barbara Buhler Lynes, Curator, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and the Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center. Beginning in the 1910s, when Alfred Stieglitz began making photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe, to the end of her life, in 1986, O'Keeffe was sought out by numerous American photographers, who made her a subject in their work. When The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, closed in 2006, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum was fortunate to receive its collection of photographs of O'Keeffe. On display will be selections of these works, along with other photographs of O'Keeffe from the Museum's collection, taken at various times in her life by photographers such as Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh, Alfred Stieglitz, Tony Vaccaro, Todd Webb, and Don Worth. New Mexico and New York: Photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe was organized by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. This exhibition and related programming were made possible in part by a generous grant from The Burnett Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, The Kerr Foundation, the Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax, New Mexico Tourism Department, New Mexico Arts (a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs), the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum’s National Council, and the Members of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.
Curated by Barbara Buhler Lynes, Curator, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and the Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center. Beginning in the 1910s, when Alfred Stieglitz began making photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe, to the end of her life, in 1986, O'Keeffe was sought out by numerous American photographers, who made her a subject in their work. When The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, closed in 2006, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum was fortunate to receive its collection of photographs of O'Keeffe. On display will be selections of these works, along with other photographs of O'Keeffe from the Museum's collection, taken at various times in her life by photographers such as Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh, Alfred Stieglitz, Tony Vaccaro, Todd Webb, and Don Worth. New Mexico and New York: Photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe was organized by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. This exhibition and related programming were made possible in part by a generous grant from The Burnett Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, The Kerr Foundation, the Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax, New Mexico Tourism Department, New Mexico Arts (a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs), the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum’s National Council, and the Members of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.
Georgia O'Keeffe: Beyond Our Shores
May 22, 2009 - September 20, 2009
Exhibition Curator: Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Curator, and the Emily Fisher Landau Research Center Director.
O’Keeffe: Beyond Our Shores is a selection of seldom seen O’Keeffe works that were inspired by her travels outside of the United States: Bermuda (1933 and 1934), Hawaii before it became part of the United States (1939), Peru (1957), andAsia (1959 and 1960). These works have never before been exhibited together, and among them is a recent gift to the Museum from a private collector of the wonderful oil painting, White Bird of Paradise, 1939. O’Keeffe completed it when in Hawaii in 1939 as a guest of the Dole Pineapple Company that had commissioned her to make paintings for its advertising campaigns.
“O’Keeffe traveled infrequently outside of the United States during the twenty-two years she was married to Alfred Stieglitz,” says Museum Curator, Barbara Buhler Lynes, “but shortly after his death in 1946, her pattern changed.” Beginning in 1951, O’Keeffe initiated a series of trips to Mexico, Peru, various countries in Europe, and in 1959 and 1960, she traveled around the world stopping in, among other places, Japan, Taiwan, India, Iraq, the Holy Land, and Egypt. What she saw in some of the countries she visited inspired her to make the paintings and drawings that that will be on display.
The Museum is fortunate to house a full range of O’Keeffe’s art (1,150 works) from her daring and innovative abstractions of the 1910s and 1920s to her elegant and often provocative investigations of various subject matter, such as architecture, landscapes, flowers, rocks and bones. A selection of works from the permanent collection will be on display throughout the rest of the Museum.
Exhibition Curator: Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Curator, and the Emily Fisher Landau Research Center Director.
O’Keeffe: Beyond Our Shores is a selection of seldom seen O’Keeffe works that were inspired by her travels outside of the United States: Bermuda (1933 and 1934), Hawaii before it became part of the United States (1939), Peru (1957), andAsia (1959 and 1960). These works have never before been exhibited together, and among them is a recent gift to the Museum from a private collector of the wonderful oil painting, White Bird of Paradise, 1939. O’Keeffe completed it when in Hawaii in 1939 as a guest of the Dole Pineapple Company that had commissioned her to make paintings for its advertising campaigns.
“O’Keeffe traveled infrequently outside of the United States during the twenty-two years she was married to Alfred Stieglitz,” says Museum Curator, Barbara Buhler Lynes, “but shortly after his death in 1946, her pattern changed.” Beginning in 1951, O’Keeffe initiated a series of trips to Mexico, Peru, various countries in Europe, and in 1959 and 1960, she traveled around the world stopping in, among other places, Japan, Taiwan, India, Iraq, the Holy Land, and Egypt. What she saw in some of the countries she visited inspired her to make the paintings and drawings that that will be on display.
The Museum is fortunate to house a full range of O’Keeffe’s art (1,150 works) from her daring and innovative abstractions of the 1910s and 1920s to her elegant and often provocative investigations of various subject matter, such as architecture, landscapes, flowers, rocks and bones. A selection of works from the permanent collection will be on display throughout the rest of the Museum.
Jimson Weed: Returns from the White House
May 22, 2009 - September 20, 2009
In 2002, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum loaned one of its iconic flower paintings to the White House, Jimson Weed, 1932, as one of a number of paintings selected from various museums for the walls of the dining room in the White House’s private quarters. Jimson Weed was returned recently, and will be on display again for the first time in eight years, along with several sketches that O’Keeffe made of this flower. Also on display is a glass plate with an image of a Jimson Weed that was commissioned by the Steuben Company in the 1930s as one of a special edition of plates engraved with drawings by famous artists.
Georgia O'Keeffe: Beyond our Shores is showing concurrently.
In 2002, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum loaned one of its iconic flower paintings to the White House, Jimson Weed, 1932, as one of a number of paintings selected from various museums for the walls of the dining room in the White House’s private quarters. Jimson Weed was returned recently, and will be on display again for the first time in eight years, along with several sketches that O’Keeffe made of this flower. Also on display is a glass plate with an image of a Jimson Weed that was commissioned by the Steuben Company in the 1930s as one of a special edition of plates engraved with drawings by famous artists.
Georgia O'Keeffe: Beyond our Shores is showing concurrently.
