SANTA FE, NM.- The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum will present two special exhibitions for its summer visitors in galleries eight and nine: Jimson Weed Returns from the White House and Georgia O'Keeffe: Beyond Our Shores from May 22 - September 20, 2009. In addition, selections from the Museum's permanent collection will be on view in galleries one through seven.
In 2002, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum loaned one of its iconic flower paintings to the White House, Jimson Weed, 1932, as one of a number of paintings selected from various museums for the walls of the dining room in the White House's private quarters. Jimson Weed was returned recently, and will be on display again for the first time in eight years, along with several sketches that O'Keeffe made of this flower. Also on display is a glass plate with an image of a Jimson Weed that was commissioned by the Steuben Company in the 1930s as one of a special edition of plates engraved with drawings by famous artists.
O'Keeffe: Beyond Our Shores is a selection of seldom seen O'Keeffe works that were inspired by her travels outside of the United States: Bermuda (1933 and 1934), Hawaii before it became part of the United States (1939), Peru (1957), and Asia (1959 and 1960). These works have never before been exhibited together, and among them is a recent gift to the Museum from a private collector of the wonderful oil painting, White Bird of Paradise, 1939. O'Keeffe completed it when in Hawaii in 1939 as a guest of the Dole Pineapple Company that had commissioned her to make paintings for its advertising campaigns.
"O'Keeffe traveled infrequently outside of the United States during the twenty-two years she was married to Alfred Stieglitz," says Museum Curator, Barbara Buhler Lynes, "but shortly after his death in 1946, her pattern changed." Beginning in 1951, O'Keeffe initiated a series of trips to Mexico, Peru, various countries in Europe, and in 1959 and 1960, she traveled around the world stopping in, among other places, Japan, Taiwan, China, India, Iraq, the Holy Land, and Egypt. What she saw in some of the countries she visited inspired her to make the paintings and drawings that will be on display.
The Museum is fortunate to house a full range of O'Keeffe's art (1,150 works) from her daring and innovative abstractions of the 1910s and 1920s to her elegant and often provocative investigations of various subject matter, such as architecture, landscapes, flowers, rocks and bones. A selection of works from the permanent collection will be on display throughout the rest of the Museum.
"I have but one desire as a painter - that is to paint what I see, as I see it, in my own way, without regard for the desires or tastes of the professional dealer or the professional collector. I attribute what little success I have had to this fact." (Georgia O'Keeffe in B. Vladimir Berman, "She Painted the Lily and Got $25,000 and Fame for Doing It! Not in a Rickety Atelier but in a Hotel Suite on the 30th Floor, Georgia O'Keeffe [sic], New Find of Art World, Sets Her Easel," New York Evening Graphic [12 May 1928], 3M.)
