Minneapolis Institute of Arts
About the Exhibition

Enter O'Keeffe's uniquely beautiful world through this intimate look at one of the most original American artists of the 20th century.

This stunning exhibition features 42 extraordinary works, including paintings, watercolors, and sculpture. It will inspire you to see O'Keeffe in a new way - as a pioneer of modernism with a unique ability to interpret nature, perfecting a language that remained utterly her own.

Click here to listen to curator Sue Canterbury talk about the exhibition.


From her earliest mature works to her final paintings - over the course of a career spanning more than seven decades - Georgia O'Keeffe consistently incorporated circular forms into her compositions.

Her use of this motif stands in contrast to strategies of abstraction adopted by many of her peers, which tended to be Cubist-based, using straight lines and angles rather than curves and circles. Using the circle and its kin - the ellipse, the oval, and the arcing line - O'Keeffe explored the shifting terrain between abstraction and representation, sometimes calling upon such forms to represent a mood, a reaction to a sensation, or the spiritual essence of a subject, while at other times using them to encourage her viewers to see new relationships between familiar objects.

Despite O'Keeffe's broad popularity and the numerous exhibitions devoted to her work both during her lifetime and posthumously, this exhibition is the first devoted to this aspect of her work, and promises to make an important addition to scholarship on both O'Keeffe and twentieth-century American art.

Red Flower, 1919
Oil on canvas, 20 ¼ x 17 ¼ inches (51.4 x 43.8 cm)
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida. Purchase, the Esther B. O'Keeffe Charitable Foundation, 96.5
© 2006 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York



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