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 will invite 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.