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Georgia O'Keeffe was born in a farmhouse on a large dairy farm outside of
Sun Prairie, Wisconsin on November 15, 1887. She knew from an early age
she would be an artist.
O'Keeffe
received her formal art education at the Art Institute of Chicago and
the Art Student league in New York City. In 1914, she accepted a
teaching position at Columbia College in South Carolina. Her schedule
was tight enough to allow her to paint. It was here she began to strip
away what she had learned and paint what she felt. "I have things in my
head that are not like what anyone has taught me... shapes and ideas so
near to me... so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't
occurred to me to put them down... "
O'Keeffe married Alfred Stieglitz, renowned art critic and
photographer, and traveled in New York, where such paintings as
The Brooklyn Bridge were born, as well as some of her most
popular works, her enormous flower pictures.
A trip to Taos, New Mexico in 1929 would forever change O'Keeffe's
life. She said of this land: " ...out the very large window to rich
green alfalfa fields, then the sage brush and beyond - a most perfect
mountain... I feel like myself, and I like it."
After Stieglitz's death in 1946, O'Keeffe returned to the southwest
living in Albuquerque. "All the earth colors of the painter's palette are
out there in the many miles
of badlands... " Here she painted her series of skulls describing them
as "[cutting] sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive
on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable...and
knows no kindness with all its beauty."
In 1962, Georgia O'Keeffe was elected to the 50 member American Academy
of Arts and Letters, the nation's highest honor society for people in
the arts. She died in 1986 at the age of 98.
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