Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe was one of the first American artists to create abstract works of art.

She was born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin in 1887. The second of seven children, she grew up on her family’s farm. As a child, O’Keeffe was enrolled in private art lessons, and by the time she graduated from high school, she was determined to become an artist.

After attending the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, O’Keeffe studied at Teachers College, Columbia University to become an art teacher. In 1916, a friend took a group of her drawings to photographer Alfred Stieglitz who showed them in an exhibition at his gallery in New York. Encouraged by Stieglitz’s interest in her work, O’Keeffe continued to make charcoal drawings and began to use watercolor paint.

In 1918, O’Keeffe moved from Texas to New York and took up oil painting. She began to create abstract shapes similar to those in her drawings. She and Stieglitz were married in 1924. Through her connection to Stieglitz and the photographers who were their friends, she became familiar with the ways that framing and cropping a photographic image or enlarging a detail can create an abstraction and began to use these techniques in her work. O’Keeffe’s flower paintings caused a sensation when they were first exhibited in 1925. When looking at the paintings, one art critic described feeling “as if we humans were butterflies.”

In 1929, O’Keeffe traveled to New Mexico for the first time; afterward she returned often to visit and eventually bought a house there. After Stieglitz died in 1946, O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico where she continued to make art until her death in 1986.