Georgia O'Keeffe

Born on November 15, 1887, in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Georgia O'Keeffe studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York. Disillusioned with classical academic imitation, she embraced the revolutionary pedagogical philosophy of Arthur Wesley Dow, who advocated creating works based on personal interpretation and compositional harmony rather than mere copying. In 1916, photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz exhibited her innovative charcoal drawings at his famous 291 Gallery in New York, initiating an intensely fruitful artistic and romantic partnership; they married in 1924. Throughout the 1920s, O'Keeffe produced monumental, magnified flower paintings—including 'Black Iris' and 'Jimson Weed'—that transformed natural forms into breathtaking modernist abstractions, as well as dramatic architectural studies of Manhattan skyscrapers. Beginning in 1929, she spent summers exploring Northern New Mexico, captivated by the stark red adobe hills, desert bones, and vast southwestern skies of Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú, where she settled permanently in 1949. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, O'Keeffe lived to age 98, leaving behind an indelible visual vocabulary that defined American modernist art.