This exhibition complements Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, a new look at this iconic artist through her art, fashion, and style. On view July 20 – October 20, 2019.
“Maybe it seems mad…that I go out like this and live out under the stars and the sky for a few days—but I am like that.”
Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz, 1940
The beauty and elegance of Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings were prompted by the intimacy of her experience with the Southwest’s natural forms, especially in relationship to her paintings of the landscape surrounding her home at Ghost Ranch. Further from home, she made repeated camping trips to draw and paint at three extraordinary sites in the Southwest: Glen Canyon, Utah, and places in New Mexico that she referred to as “The White Place” and “The Black Place.” This exhibition presents a selection of fifty objects of camping gear belonging to O’Keeffe—everything from her flashlight to her Stanley thermos. The long drive from the artist’s home at Ghost Ranch made it an impossible day trip; painting and drawing the barren hills required camping. Between 1936 and 1949, the artist returned to these sites many times to create more than a dozen major works inspired by the astonishing landscape, isolated far off the road and away from all civilization.
