Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
A BOLD LEGACY
O'Keeffe, modern artists side by side in new exhibition
Georgia O’Keeffe is an American icon. Her bold florals and observational images of landscapes, buildings and the natural world earned her distinction as the “Mother of American Modernism,” and her work is some of the most recognizable in the collection at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. On May 26, the museum debuted its new temporary exhibition “The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art,” celebrating O’Keeffe and the themes she explored throughout her career — alongside a group of 20 modern artists whose work in similar themes extends her legacy.
“She’s the starting point, but the contemporary artists are equally important, and really I think people will be blown away by those works as well,” says co-curator Lauren Haynes. “We’re hoping people will come in and see O’Keeffes they love and even discover some O’Keeffes maybe they’ve never seen before, but then also discover these artists that they may not know and come away with perhaps a new favorite artist.”
“Anyone [who gets to] be in the same room with her work, it’s a huge honor. She’s like a rock star in the world of art, but she’s not inaccessible,” shares Louise Jones, whose site-specific mural is part of the exhibition and was finished earlier this month. “A lot of people appreciate her work [who] are not deep in the art world, and it doesn’t take a deeper level of understanding to appreciate it — it has a lot to offer at face value.”
That approachability in O’Keeffe’s work becomes all the more impressive and intriguing when one considers the trajectory that lifted her to a previously unprecedented level of celebrity during her life. At a time when women in any field faced steep inequality, O’Keeffe held a persistence and a work ethic that helped her refuse to let herself or her experience be dictated by her gender.
“I often like to make the point, as O’Keeffe made herself during her lifetime, that she is not a great woman artist. She is a great artist. Period,” offers Cody Hartley, who is the senior director of Collections and Interpretation at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M. “She reflected an enormous courage and sense of conviction that I think gives all of us a model for both how we might live our own lives, but [also] the importance of creating space for others to live their lives and for expression as a way of achieving one’s greatest possible contribution.”
Significance also lies in O’Keeffe’s rejection of the romanticizing of Europe by some of her contemporaries. Her interest in “creating the great American thing,” Hartley points out — of reflecting the experience of living in the United States — sets her work apart even further when you realize she was doing things no one else at the time was doing.
“So she emerges as this kind of representative of American art and American modernism,” Hartley says. “At the same time, she is one of the very first artists anywhere in the world to really embrace abstraction — to take the tools of an artist and use them to say something expressive, to say something personal, to say something reflective that’s communicated in ways that are not representational. She’s not trying to imitate the visual appearance of the world as we see it.
“She’s trying to make a kind of translation into something that would only be possible through art,” he goes on. For example, “if you think of the way a symphony [creates] an emotional response, it’s hard to explain why it does that, but it does it. We know it does it, but it doesn’t do it through descriptive things — there’s not a narrative, there’s not language or words telling you that it’s supposed to be happy or sad. But you feel it when you see one of her paintings; she wants her paintings to do the same thing.”
“I always feel like she is a revolutionary in her own right,” Jones adds, because “she is able to take something that is a traditional subject — and I’m just talking about her floral work — to take something like that, which is as old as time, and to do something unique and provocative with it is really awesome, and I think that it’s inspirational for a lot of artists to look at her work and to read her story and to know about her as a person.”
Artists like Jones were invited to be a part of the exhibition based on similar themes of the natural world, still lifes and abstraction present in their work. It was only after studio visits and interacting with the artists, Haynes reveals, that O’Keeffe was mentioned at all.
“Some of the artists would [then] say, ‘O’Keeffe is an artist that I think about a lot,’ and it was really interesting to see because that is in some of the work that looks the most dissimilar to O’Keeffe’s,” she shares. “So it really speaks to that idea that influence for contemporary artists isn’t just, ‘This is how this artist did it, so I’m going to do it the same way,’ but it’s more about ‘it can be something different.’”
Following the exhibition’s close in September, it will travel to North Carolina and Connecticut for showings. This sharing of scholarship and research produced in-house on a national scale is no small accomplishment for a museum little more than six years old.
“That’s really exciting, to get it to people who maybe wouldn’t have the opportunity to come here within the timeline of the exhibition being on view,” Haynes enthuses. “For the shows that we craft, we’re really thinking about what are strengths that we have in the collection or expertise on the team that we can really use to pull out great and exciting exhibitions that are asking people to enjoy work but also to think about certain ideas.
“It feels like this is the next step in the museum,” she continues, “and sort of what we’ve been doing since opening [in] really trying to grow our reach, but also just have really exciting and interesting exhibitions and projects that are looking at American art and trying to be more open and tell a more complete story of what that is.”