Access O’Keeffe, a Groundbreaking Digital Catalogue Raisonné, to Launch in Early 2026

Project led by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum will allow global audiences to explore every known Georgia O’Keeffe artwork.

EMBARGOED UNTIL EARLY 2026–October 1, 2025–(Santa Fe, NM)–Georgia
O’Keeffe’s digital catalogue raisonné, Access O’Keeffe, will make its official launch in
2026, allowing access to every known work by the artist through dynamic tools, interactive browsing, and real-time research updates.

Supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Access O’Keeffe addresses the limitations of a printed catalogue raisonné and creates a new model for what is possible through a reimagined digital platform. Access O’Keeffe provides an accessible, dynamic platform to explore the life and art of Georgia O’Keeffe as a user-friendly, searchable website with high-resolution images, visual descriptions, exhibition histories, archival materials, and research data associated with the artist’s two-volume catalogue raisonné, originally written by the Museum’s founding curator and preeminent O’Keeffe scholar Barbara Buhler Lynes in 1999. Access O’Keeffe preserves the integrity of the extensive research by Lynes, while incorporating and citing updates from new scholarship, allowing a reader to trace the ideas surrounding a work.

“A catalogue raisonné has long been considered the final word on an artist’s work. With Access O’Keeffe, we’re flipping that idea on its head—transforming it into a living dialogue where new voices, discoveries, and perspectives can continuously reshape what we know about Georgia O’Keeffe,” said Liz Neely, Curator of Digital Experience, who spearheaded the project.

The resulting product, built on a linked data platform (using the open Linked Art data standard), offers entirely new ways to explore O’Keeffe’s full body of work. Visitors can browse by color, shape, or medium, explore the context of works created before and after a specific painting, trace historic exhibitions, create lists of favorites, and download images. In addition to the Museum’s own collection, more than 130 partner organizations have contributed up-to-date information on works in their collections, including the National Gallery of Art, the McNay Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo. As new scholarship emerges, the digital catalogue raisonné can be updated in real time.

Access O’Keeffe has been carefully envisioned by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum after years of audience research to understand what both scholars and the public seek in a digital tool. The result is a platform that balances usability for broad audiences with the rigor and integrity demanded by researchers. This vision was brought to life through the user interface design of the Museum’s technical partners, Design for Context, ensuring the tool is both intuitive and deeply functional.

“Together we’ve been creating ways to illuminate and expand understanding of the connections between this remarkable artist’s works, the places she cherished, the letters she wrote, the people and things in her life, and the research done about her,” said Duane Degler, principal strategist at Design for Context, who has been guiding the development of Access O’Keeffe and its predecessor, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s Collections Online, for eight years. “As we continue to add new types of data, the opportunities for exploratory discovery continue to grow, creating ‘aha’ moments for museum visitors and deepening the research potential for scholars.”

One example of the evolving research will be listed under the work On the River I, ca. 1965. The painting features sandstone hues swirling around a patch of bright pink sky. The piece had been in O’Keeffe’s personal collection until her death and was then gifted to the Museum by the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. The original catalogue raisonné listed the piece as a horizontal or landscape orientation. After an examination by the Museum’s Head of Conservation, Dale Kronkright, he discovered evidence of mounting hardware indicating the piece was hung on its shorter side, in a vertical or portrait orientation. The Museum has hung the painting vertically ever since. The changed orientation will be listed in Access O’Keeffe with Kronkright’s finding as supporting evidence.

Select media outlets can attend an exclusive Georgia O’Keeffe Museum members event with Liz Neely, as she delves into this project and the contributions from the O’Keeffe’s digital experience and curatorial teams. This virtual event will be on Zoom on Thursday, October 16, from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM MT. To register for the event, contact Public Relations Manager Renee Lucero at rlucero@gokm.org or 505-946-1063.

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For media inquiries, contact:
Renee Lucero | Public Relations Manager, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum | 505-946-1063

ABOUT THE GEORGIA O’KEEFFE MUSEUM: Since 1997, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum celebrates the art, life, and independent spirit of Georgia O’Keeffe. Located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Georgia O’Keeffe lived the final decades of her life, the O’Keeffe has sites and experiences in two historic destinations, Santa Fe and Abiquiú. For more information, please visit gokm.org.