An American artist of Georgia Totto O'Keeffe

On November 15, 1887, Georgia O’Keeffe was the second of seven children and the oldest born to a Totto O’Keeffe and Francis Calyxus O’Keeffe, owners of a prosperous 640-acre farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.

O'Keeffe was an important figure among the first generation of American modern artists.

O’Keeffe, who began drawing at an early age, was given art lessons on Saturday afternoons for a woman in Sun Prairie and with her younger sisters. O’Keeffe graduated from the Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginal in 1904 and entered the Art Institute of Chicago that same year.

She attended Teacher’s College at Columbia University and the University of Virginia. In 1916 O’Keeffe became an art teacher at West Texas State Normal College. She was inspired by the wide horizons and the overarching sky. The openness of the space changed her work, and she began to paint the infinite variations of light coming onto the Plains especially at sunrise and sunset.

Red Canna, 1923

O’Keeffe’s mature style was fully developed when she moved back to New York in the summer of 1918.  O’Keeffe had shown her work publicly as early as 1917 but it was Alfred Stieglitz’s photography show at the Anderson Galleries in New York, on February 2, 1921 that established her as major artist.

Georgia O’Keeffe died in Santa Fe on March 6, 1986.
An American artist of Georgia Totto O'Keeffe