Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern offers a new look at an iconic American artist. Presenting O’Keeffe’s remarkable wardrobe in dialogue with selected paintings and photographs spanning her career, this singular exhibition provides a focused examination of the modernist aesthetic persona O’Keeffe crafted for herself through her dress, her art, and her progressive, independent lifestyle. In addition to paintings and items of clothing, the exhibition presents photographs of O’Keeffe and her homes by Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Annie Leibovitz, Philippe Halsman, Yousuf Karsh, Cecil Beaton, Andy Warhol, Bruce Weber, and others.

The exhibition is organized in sections that run from her early years, when O’Keeffe crafted a signature style of dress that dispensed with ornamentation; to her years in New York, in the 1920s and 1930s, when a black-and-white palette dominated much of her art and dress; and to her later years in New Mexico, where her art and clothing changed in response to the surrounding colors of the Southwestern landscape. The final section explores the enormous role photography played in the artist’s reinvention of herself in the Southwest, when a younger generation of photographers visited her, solidifying her status as a pioneer of modernism and as a contemporary style icon.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern is organized by the Brooklyn Museum, with guest curator Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University, and made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The accompanying book is supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art and the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, and is published by the Brooklyn Museum in association with DelMonico Books • Prestel.