A new exhibition opening Friday at the Detroit Institute of Arts is putting a side of Georgia O'Keeffe that most people never see front and center: not flowers, not desert bones, but buildings. Georgia O'Keeffe: Architecture brings together nearly 40 works spanning four decades of the artist's career, from Manhattan skyscrapers to sun-bleached adobe walls in New Mexico, and it all grew out of a single painting already sitting in the DIA's own collection.
That painting is Stables, a 1932 canvas O'Keeffe made during a road trip across Quebec, depicting a white barn she encountered along the way, according to The Detroit News. The work entered the DIA's permanent collection in 1945 as a gift from Grosse Pointe collector Robert H. Tannahill, according to the Detroit Institute of Arts. It's the only piece in the entire show that the museum actually owns.
Everything else had to be borrowed. The exhibition pulls loans from institutions across the country, including the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, the Eiteljorg Museum, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, per the DIA's media materials. Among the headline pieces on view are O'Keeffe's 1928 skyscraper painting East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel, on loan from the New Britain Museum of American Art, and Black Door with Red, a 1954 work from the Chrysler Museum.
How a 2015 Hire Became a Multi-Museum Project
The idea took root after DIA curator Ben Colman joined the museum in 2015 and started digging into the history of Stables, as reported by The Guardian. Colman, the DIA's curator of American art, said the painting documents a meaningful encounter for O'Keeffe, according to The Detroit News. He described the work as using minimal colors and forms to transform a humble structure into something luminous.
Colman said O'Keeffe deliberately chose the architecture she painted, and that her questions about form, color, geometry and composition connect small objects with city blocks and skyscrapers, per the same account. He also noted that the museum hasn't presented an O'Keeffe exhibition in decades, and the DIA says this is the first show of its kind. Colman called it a rare chance to see O'Keeffe in a new light, arguing her architectural subjects reflect her biography by anchoring her in specific times and places.
Three Galleries, Four Decades of Buildings
The show organizes O'Keeffe's work into three geographic and thematic sections covering New York City urban views, rural farm architecture, and New Mexico adobe structures, spanning the 1920s through 1960, according to Architectural Record. That includes paintings inspired by New York City skyscrapers, rural structures in a small upstate New York town, and adobe architecture in northern New Mexico, per The Detroit News.
DIA director Salvador Salort-Pons said the exhibition brings together architectural paintings from across O'Keeffe's career, calling her one of the most important and beloved American artists. The framing pushes back against how critics in the 1920s tried to box O'Keeffe in as a “woman painter,” a label she rejected throughout her career while insisting her architectural abstractions belonged alongside the work of her male contemporaries, according to the DIA.
Digital Projections Bring the Patio and Skyline to Life
To go along with the physical artwork, the DIA is complementing the exhibit with two immersive experiences. One depicts the open-air patio from O'Keeffe's New Mexico home and tracks how it changes as daylight shifts throughout the day, while the other recreates the view from her high-rise apartment near Manhattan's Shelton Hotel in the 1920s and compares it with the same skyline today. Salort-Pons said the immersive elements help bring O'Keeffe's world and creative vision to life.
What It Costs to See It
Georgia O'Keeffe: Architecture runs from Friday through January 3 at the museum's Woodward Avenue location. General admission tickets run $30 for adults and $15 for youth, but residents of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties — who already get free general museum admission thanks to a tri-county property tax millage voters first approved in 2012 — can see the special exhibition for a discounted $20 for adults and $10 for youth.
The DIA has also published a companion catalog, Georgia O'Keeffe Architecture Catalog, retailing for $35 through the museum shop alongside exhibition prints, per the DIA Museum Shop. The show arrives on the heels of another blockbuster run for the museum: its Contemporary Anishinaabe Art exhibition closed in April after drawing more than 66,000 visitors, more than double its original forecast, as Hoodline reported when crowds packed the DIA for that show's final days.
