Mornings with O’Keeffe: Georgia O’Keeffe | Architecture

Georgia O’Keeffe was fascinated by architecture throughout her life. In this lecture, Benjamin Colman, Curator of American Art at The Detroit Institute of Arts, will consider the ways O’Keeffe responded to the built environment across her prolific career—from barns at Lake George, to skyscrapers in Manhattan, to the adobe walls of her New Mexico homes. Her paintings of architecture are insightful, abstracted, and often autobiographical, detailing the places that shaped her distinctive vision of the places across the United States where she lived and worked. 

Colman is curator of American Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and curator of the current temporary exhibit Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture (On view at the Detroit Institute of Arts from September 11, 2026–January 3, 2027).

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This talk is presented as part of Mornings with O’Keeffe, a free virtual lecture series held on the first Wednesday of each month. Please register in advance. Email contact@gokm.org or call 505-496-1000 for assistance with event registration.

Can’t make the talk? This program will be recorded and posted on our website and YouTube Channel.

About the Speaker

Benjamin Colman, curator of American art, is a specialist in American art and decorative arts who joined the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2015. At the DIA, he curated the exhibit Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture (2026–2027). He previously organized the exhibit Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City 1950–2020 (2020–2022), and two traveling exhibits supported by ArtBridges: Rethinking Monuments: American Sculpture in its Time (2022–2023), and Visions of American Life: Paintings from the Manoogian Collection (2018–2019). He currently chairs the editorial board for the peer-reviewed scholarly journal the Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Prior to joining the DIA, he served as assistant curator at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut and as a curatorial fellow at the Yale University Art Gallery. Mr. Colman earned an M.A. from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, and a B.A. in the History of Art at Yale University.