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Collectors Circle—Before Santa Fe: Georgia O’Keeffe in the 1920s
Friends of American Art and Design events are available exclusively to Family & Friends–level Members and above. Join today.
Although better known as a painter of the Southwest, Georgia O’Keeffe developed her bold modernist style well before embarking upon her life in New Mexico in 1929. This talk by Sarah Kelly Oehler—the Field-McCormick Chair and Curator, Arts of the Americas, and vice president of curatorial strategy at the Art Institute of Chicago—will explore the incredible range of O’Keeffe’s aesthetic experimentation in the pivotal decade of the 1920s, during which time she moved seasonally between Manhattan and Lake George in upstate New York. Her innovative works focused on the objects and spaces around her, from landscapes and cityscapes, to floral images and still lifes (among them Shell and Old Shingle VI), to evocative compositions such as Dark Abstraction that express the power of her artistic vision to transcend the seen world.
Registration is required. RSVP before September 30 to 314.655.5126 or [email protected].
About the speaker
Sarah Kelly Oehler is the Field-McCormick Chair and Curator, Arts of the Americas, and vice president of curatorial strategy at the Art Institute of Chicago. She recently served as the venue curator and catalogue essayist for Elizabeth Catlett: “A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies.” She is currently developing the exhibition Edward Hopper and the Movies (working title), scheduled for 2028. She is also leading her team in a large-scale reimagination and reinstallation of the Arts of the Americas galleries.
Previous projects include the exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” (2024), which explored the artist’s urban subjects within the broader context of her work of the 1920s, and the acquisition and installation of the monumental Hartwell Memorial Window by Tiffany Studios. In 2018, Oehler curated the critically acclaimed Charles White: A Retrospective, the first major retrospective of this influential African American artist in several decades. Other exhibitions include Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945 (2018), Whistler’s Mother: An American Icon Returns to Chicago (2017), America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s (2016), Shatter Rupture Break: The Modern Series I (2015), and They Seek a City: Chicago and the Art of Migration, 1910–1950 (2013). She has contributed to numerous other exhibitions and publications at the museum, including Whistler Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago (2020), Ivan Albright Paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago (2019), and American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago from World War I to 1955 (2009). She received her docrorate in American art from Columbia University and her bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University.
Collectors Circle schedule
5:30 pm, Auditorium Lobby
Reception
6:30 pm, Education Center
Presentation by Sarah Kelly Oehler
After Hours Event Entry
This event occurs after the Museum closes to the public at 5 pm. The Museum will reopen for event attendees.
Please enter through the East Building entrance or the parking garage at 6 pm.
Collectors Circle programs at the Saint Louis Art Museum are presented by the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation.
