Exploring “Pink Tulip, 1925”

Join Dr. Laura Wertheim Joseph, Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Dale Kronkright, Head of Conservation at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, as they discuss the unique, creative story of Pink Tulip—one of the Museum’s newest acquisitions.

Pink Tulip, 1925 (Abstraction #77) is an oil on canvas painted by Georgia O’Keeffe in 1925. One of four tulip subjects painted by O’Keeffe between 1925 and 1926, O’Keeffe retained possession of this work for sixty years. Joseph and Kronkright will discuss the significance of the painting’s high-key colors and narrow vertical format, as well as O’Keeffe’s serial approach to tulip flowers and her response to sexualized interpretations of her floral subjects.

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This event is free to attend and part of our free Mornings with O’Keeffe lecture series on the first Wednesday of every month. Please register in advance. For assistance with event registration, email contact@gokm.org or call 505-496-1000. Can’t make the talk? This program will be recorded and posted on our website and YouTube Channel.

About the Speakers:

Dr. Laura Wertheim Joseph joined the O’Keeffe in 2024 as Director of Curatorial Affairs and provides strategic leadership for the Museum’s collections, exhibitions, and research initiatives. Joseph, who was born and raised in Albuquerque, most recently served as the curator and director of exhibitions at the Minnesota Museum of American Art (the M) in St. Paul, where she played a leadership role in reviving the historic organization based on a collaborative, community-led curatorial model. She specializes in modern and contemporary art with a focus on embodiment, affect, and materiality, as well as intersectional feminism and gender and performance studies. Through her work, she seeks to celebrate undervalued sources of wisdom, underrecognized creative practices, and less common perspectives on cultural production.

Dale Kronkright has been Head of Conservation at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum since its inception in 1997. Dale began research into O’Keeffe’s studio materials and techniques in 2000 with scientists and conservators at the National Gallery of Art, resulting in the 2006 exhibition and catalog “Color and Conservation,” which documented the 40-year friendship of conservator Caroline Keck and Georgia O’Keeffe. His latest research on O’Keeffe’s studio materials and techniques was published in 2021 in the essay “An Intentional Language: The Studio Materials and Methods of Georgia O’Keeffe, 1915–1975” in the 2020 exhibition catalog for Georgia O’Keeffe, at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, in Madrid.

Dale earned his BA in American Culture Studies from the University of California at Davis and his postgraduate certificate in Conservation at the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Before coming to work for the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Dale was Senior Conservator for the Museum of New Mexico for seven years and was Senior Conservator at the Regional Conservation Center, Bishop Museum, Honolulu for six years.

He has served as an instructor and author for the Getty Conservation Institute and as adjunct faculty at the Art Conservation Graduate Program at SUNY Buffalo and the Department of Art Conservation at the University of Delaware at Winterthur.