Eloquent Objects
Georgia O’Keeffe and Still-Life Art in New Mexico
Upper Gallery October 16 - January 3, 2016
“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single
thing I’ve wanted to do.” –Georgia O’Keeffe
“This exhibition brings much needed attention to the painted interpretations of the American Southwest
by O’Keeffe and her contemporaries. It explores the ways these artists took simple, seemingly mute
objects and with them conveyed natural and human dramas that described a distinctive locale and its
rich cultural history.” –Charles C. Eldredge, Curator and essayist of the accompanying exhibition book
The exhibition is the first major exhibition to focus on the role of the still life as a means of exploring the
culture and diversity of the region of the Southwestern United States. Included by many of the other
artists are still life concentrations by Marsden Hartley, Victor Higgins, Joseph Henry Sharp, Ward
Lockwood, and Dorothy Morang, among the others. Each has taken the genre into realms of the spiritual
incorporating artifact and Pueblo culture, edibles and pottery, cut and arranged flowers local textiles
that lend the rich New Mexican subjects of within the Hispanic santos (or saints) the color palette,
patterns and arrangements. O’Keeffe was influenced by her surroundings and how she felt about the
place she came to call home after first visiting in 1917. It wasn’t until 1949 after her husband Alfred
Steiglitz passed away that she returned permanently. She and other artists came to see the qualities of
New Mexico as unique and vibrant in its diversity and the still life proved to be a remarkable genre to
express this sense they all shared.
The exhibition features 47 paintings and range in date from the early twentieth century and the
formation of the southwest region’s art colonies to the 1950s. The works were selected from
distinguished lenders including Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, Amon Carter Museum of
American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Denver Art
Museum, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art-The University of Oklahoma, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum,
Harwood Museum , Orlando Museum of Art, Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts, Roswell Museum and Art Center, New Mexico, Spencer Museum of Art, University
of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque,
among others.
The Art Museum of South Texas is pleased to announce on Friday December 4th at 6pm Art Talk Georgia
O’Keeffe in Texas: A Story that’s Never Been Told, by visiting guest speaker Dr. Carolyn Kastner, Georgia
O’Keeffe Museum. Seating is first come first seated, in the H.E.B. Auditorium, doors open at 5:30 p.m..
Additionally the exhibition features segments of O’Keeffe’s most extensive interview from The Originals:
Women in Art: Georgia O'Keeffe, 1977, provided by 13 Productions LLC and WNET, edited for use in the
exhibition by Indianapolis Museum of Art.
A Sunday afternoon one time screening of the film will take place November 8 th at 3 p.m. The
film is 60 minutes and will be shown in Blue-Ray.
The exhibition book ( 9 ½ x 11 inches, 79 color plates and 160 pages, hardbound) features an essay by
the distinguished scholar Charles C. Eldridge. Former Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
and currently Hall Distinguished Professor of American Art at the University of Kansas.
Eloquent Objects: Georgia O’Keeffe and Still - Life Art in New Mexico , is curated by Charles C. Eldredge
and organized by Joseph S. Czestochowski, Produced by International Art (registered trademark logo)