O'KEEFFE, Georgia (Sun Prairie, 1887 – Santa Fe, 1986)
Georgia O’Keeffe was born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on 15 November 1887. She was given private drawing lessons at the ages of eleven and twelve in addition to instruction at school. O’Keeffe studied at the Art Institute of Chicago with John Vanderpoel from 1905 to 1906, and at the Art Students League under William Merritt Chase, F. Luis Mora and Kenyon Cox from 1907 to 1908. She visited an art class at the University of Virginia taught by Alon Bement upon whose suggestion she went to New York in 1914, to study with Arthur Dow at Teachers College, Columbia University. In the autumn of 1915 while teaching in South Carolina, O’Keeffe sent some drawings to a friend in New York who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz exhibited the drawings the following spring. Learning that her drawings were being shown without her permission, O’Keeffe went to Stieglitz requesting they be taken down. The drawings remained in place. Stieglitz gave O’Keeffe a one-person show at “291” in May of 1917. He also exhibited her paintings at the Anderson Galleries in 1923 and 1924, and they were married in 1924. O’Keeffe had annual exhibitions at Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery from 1926 to 1929 and at “An American Place Gallery” from 1930 to 1946. O’Keeffe held teaching positions at the University of Virginia Art Department, 1913–1916 (summers only); Columbia College, Columbia, South Caroline, 1915 and West Texas State Normal School, Canyon, Texas, 1916–1918. She painted her first big flower paintings in 1924, the first New York City paintings in 1926, and after an extended visit to New Mexico in 1929, she painted the first of the bone paintings in 1931. After Stieglitz’s death in 1946, O’Keeffe settled permanently in Abiquiu, New Mexico. She was honoured repeatedly with major retrospective exhibitions. She died on 6 March 1986.
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