| Georgia O’Keeffe was born November 15, 1887, near Sun Prairie, WI. From an early age she showed an interest in art. Self-taught first at her parents’ dairy farm home, she later took art lessons from a local watercolorist. In 1902 the O’Keeffe family moved to Williamsburg, VA. Georgia O’Keeffe continued her artistic pursuits there as a high school student. In the fall of 1905 she entered The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a year, and from 1907 to 1908 she attended classes at The Art Students League in New York, studying with the painter William Merritt Chase. In June of 1908 she won the League’s William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot), which allowed her to attend the Outdoor School at Lake George, NY that summer.
After a four-year span of teaching at various institutions, O’Keeffe attended a class for art teachers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in the summer of 1912. Her instructor, Alon Bement, introduced her to the teachings of his mentor, the innovative artist and art educator Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922). Dow believed in the Japanese system of light and dark, or notan, and that the goal of an artist was self-expression through the harmonious arrangement of light and color. Bement’s instruction coupled with Dow’s philosophy revolutionized O’Keeffe’s thinking about art and subsequently her own artwork.
In 1915 O’Keeffe sent a series of abstract charcoal drawings to her friend Anita Pollitzer, who showed the works to Alfred Stieglitz, an influential photographer and gallery owner living in New York City. These drawings, probably inspired by the Art Nouveau she saw in Chicago, marked the beginnings of the style for which O’Keeffe came to be known—images of flowers, animal bones, and landscapes that emphasized tone and contour.
Stieglitz began showing O’Keeffe’s work in 1916, with the first installation featuring the group of abstract charcoal drawings once sent to Anita Pollitzer. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz creatively influenced each other’s mediums of painting and photography, and they married in 1924. O’Keeffe painted, often during solitary trips to New Mexico, while almost every year Stieglitz organized exhibitions for her at his gallery An American Place in New York. They lived alternately in Manhattan and Lake George, but three years after her husband died in 1946, O’Keeffe moved permanently to Abiquiu, NM.
O’Keeffe continued to experiment with her painting and for a time traveled the world. She opened several retrospectives of her work throughout the United States and in 1962 she was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The artist, whose eyesight had deteriorated, made her last unassisted painting in 1972. On March 6, 1986, Georgia O’Keeffe died, leaving a singular legacy in American art.
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