Exhibit salutes O’Keeffe’s distinctive clothing style
A New York City museum is highlighting American artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s role as a style icon.
The Brooklyn Museum exhibit — titled Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern — features clothing, paintings and photos. It’s part of a yearlong project celebrating feminist thinking.
Guest curator Wanda M. Corn studied six decades of O’Keeffe’s garments and accessories.
She concluded that O’Keeffe, who made many of her clothes, also was an artist “in her homemaking and self-fashioning.”
Exhibit co-ordinator Lisa Small says O’Keeffe’s distinctive clothing style symbolized her lifelong commitment to minimalism.
Her paintings and clothes reflected a black-and-white palette while she was in New York and desert hues in New Mexico.
There’s a colourful exception from the artist’s New York years: an evening coat from the late 1920s or early 1930s. The elegant wraparound coat is black with a spritz of white accents at the top. A sophisticated vertical splash with blocks of dark blue, royal blue, maroon, red, orange and yellow flows gracefully toward the hem. It’s actually part of the coat’s lining, but it’s draped in a manner that allows museumgoers to admire it.
The coat is “fastened by a sizable mother-of-pearl button, her favourite button colour and material,” according to the exhibit description. Its design incorporates details from the American Arts and Crafts Movement, Corn writes. While it’s not known for certain who created it, she writes, the coat “reiterates elements O’Keeffe favoured at this time and these suggest that she was the maker.”
The show, which runs to July 23, also features portraits of O’Keeffe by photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, who was her husband, Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz.