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Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Presents
First-Ever Landscape Retrospective

Georgia O'Keeffe was instantly drawn to New Mexico's unusual and starkly beautiful landscape from the moment she first saw it in 1917. In an interview many years later she recalled:  “From then on, I was always trying to get back there and in 1929 I finally made it.”

Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place, June 11-September 12, 2004 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the first exhibition that features O'Keeffe's celebrated New Mexico landscapes. Because this unique and fascinating exhibition includes paintings that have long been in private collections, it provides an unusual opportunity to view works by O'Keeffe that have seldom been available to the public.

The exhibition documents O'Keeffe's extraordinary ability to capture the contours, colors, and textures of the land that fascinated her while remaining true to her life-long interest in and commitment to exploring issues of abstraction. According to Museum Curator Barbara Buhler Lynes, “A Sense of Place is the first exhibition to explore the meaning and significance of O'Keeffe's New Mexico landscape paintings, and it provides new and important information about the relationship between these paintings and the specific sites that inspired them.”

In addition to displaying 50 paintings that O'Keeffe depicted from 1929 to the early 1950s, the exhibition presents color photographs of 20 of the actual sites that inspired them. From the time O'Keeffe began painting in New Mexico, her landscapes have often been mistaken for imagined forms, but they are entirely based on what she was looking at and thus, the exhibition provides a new perspective from which to understand the relationship between the sources of her work and the works themselves.

An accompanying exhibition catalogue, published by Princeton University Press includes color reproductions of all works and photographs in the exhibition and offers essays by Barbara Buhler Lynes, curator of the exhibition, who has written extensively on O'Keeffe and her work, and noted authors, Lesley Poling-Kempes, and Frederick W. Turner. These essays discuss O'Keeffe's paintings and their relationship to the places that inspired her, the geology of the region from which her landscape paintings derive, and the ways in which her aloofness from the Santa Fe art community enhanced her presence as a force within it.

After being on view in Santa Fe, the exhibition, Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place, travels first to the Columbus Art Museum (October 1, 2004-January 16, 2005), and then to the Delaware Art Museum (February 17-May 15, 2005), where it will commemorate the opening of that museum's new building. 

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum was able to open on Wednesdays ahead of schedule this year.  The museum is now open 7 days a week, including Wednesdays. This fabulous landscape exhibition, "A Sense of Place" is in full swing. Friday evenings from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. are FREE.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, which opened July 17, 1997, is dedicated to perpetuating the artistic legacy of Georgia O'Keeffe and to the study and interpretation of American Modernism (1890-present).  The 13,000 square-foot Museum houses a permanent collection of more than 130 works by O'Keeffe. For visitors hours and exhibition information, call 505.946.1000 or visit the website,   www.okeeffemuseum.org

Edited by Marilyn Miller

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