Georgia O’Keeffe at the Indianapolis Museum of Art
Yesterday, I went to the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit at the IMA they’re calling “Georgia O’Keeffe and the Southwestern Still Life.” The exhibit situates O’Keeffe among her contemporaries working in American art in the early to mid-20th century in the southwest. O’Keeffe was an American woman painter when they were few women respected as painters in the US. The exhibit shows how O’Keeffe was influenced by the terroir, the architecture and the Spanish and indigenous cultural elements of the southwest. By putting her alongside her peers, the exhibit shows how O’Keeffe was in dialogue with the abstractionists of the 20th century while maintaining her own voice (I was struck by the number of O’Keeffe’s peers who just painted guitars like Picasso). There were three claims that the exhibit seems to make that I took issue with: 1. that O’Keeffe’s work is not abstract; 2. that her bones are not about death; and 3. that her flowers are not sexual. Read more
The Trott Line 