New High Museum exhibition explores O'Keefe's NYC cityscapes

October 22nd, 2024

American artist Georgia O’Keeffe is treasured for her surreal Southwestern landscapes, sensuous abstractions in color and form, and mesmerizing paintings of flowers. A major chapter of her work explores a very different subject – the cityscapes of New York, created early in her career.

A new exhibition, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, the first ever that focuses specifically on this body of O’Keeffe’s work, is coming to the High Museum: “Georgia O’Keeffe: My New Yorks,” on view from Oct. 25 through Feb. 16, 2025.

High Museum of Art Chief Curator Kevin W. Tucker joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes to discuss O’Keeffe’s years in New York City.

When asked about how the exhibition found its way to Atlanta, Tucker explained that the High Museum worked to bring it to Atlanta from their sister institution, the Art Institute of Chicago.

“It’s such a fascinating subject because it’s looking at this moment that really has not been explored in O’Keefe’s career,” he said.

That moment is O’Keefe’s time in New York with her husband Alfred Stieglitz, a tumultuous period in her life during the 1930s that saw her turn from natural landscapes to sweeping urban cityscapes.

“It’s really a clear sort of fascination with what is going on in the world from her multiple perspectives. So the micro to the macro, the buildings and the sky and the tying all of those things together [by] taking smaller details and creating these really rich and wonderful abstractions with them,” says Tucker about this period in her life.

“It’s happening at a very sort of key point in the building of the urban landscape – it’s this moment in the 1920s when America becomes more urban than rural, and the city, particularly New York, is celebrated as sort of this icon of the modern movement, in large part due to these tall buildings, which are going up.”

More information about the new exhibition can be found here.