Georgia O’Keeffe: My New Yorks at The Art Institute of Chicago offers visitors a fresh perspective on the iconic artist, who is associated with the American Southwest. Featuring 60 of her paintings and 25 photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, the exhibition highlights O’Keeffe’s experiments with media, scale, and subjects during her time in New York.
My New Yorks is the first exhibition to thoroughly explore O’Keeffe’s urban landscape paintings, drawings, and pastels, placing them within the broader context of her 1920s and early 1930s work. It presents these pieces as crucial elements of her modernist exploration of the era, rather than as exceptions to her practice.
From her abstractions and still lifes at Lake George in upstate New York to her later works upon moving to the Southwest in 1929, O’Keeffe’s pieces from this period are vital to understanding her development into the renowned artist we recognize today.
O’Keeffe moved to New York to live with her partner, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In 1924, they moved into the Shelton Hotel, then the world’s tallest residential building, which held great importance in their works. The hotel provided O’Keeffe and Stieglitz with an unobstructed view of the city, which they depicted with a reverence verging on sacred awe. This perspective is captured in works such as O’Keeffe’s “East River from the Shelton” (1927-28).
The exhibition features “Seven Americans Revisited,” a section which is reimagining O’Keeffe’s participation in the 1925 exhibition Seven Americans. The 1925 exhibition included works by Stieglitz, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, and O’Keeffe – the only woman.
O’Keeffe’s New York Street with Moon (1925) was pulled out from Seven Americans by Stieglitz, who was also the curator of the show. O’Keeffe, who was left in a fury, commented “They told me to leave New York to the men.” As an homage to the artist, The Art Institute’s section includes eight of O’Keeffe’s rural paintings and New York Street with Moon, her first New York cityscape. With persistence, O’Keeffe continued to create iconic cityscapes that mix fantasy and reality together. She referred to her paintings as “my New Yorks”.
My New Yorks offers a viewpoint to explore both New York and O’Keeffe as an artist. It explores the city by demonstrating the intersections of organic and inorganic, urban and rural through juxtaposition that includes natural effects with skyscrapers.
