Georgia O’Keeffe: Color & Conservation
The Memorial Art Gallery is one of only three venues in the country selected
to host—and the final stop for—a major exhibition of works by an
American master from October 1 to December 31.
The picture is easy to imagine: Georgia O’Keeffe, living in the small
town of Abiquiu, New Mexico, grinding her own pigments to achieve a certain
subtlety of color for one of her iconic oil paintings.
As the new exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: Color and Conservation—which
opens at the Memorial Art Gallery on October 1—makes clear, O’Keeffe
paid meticulous attention to such details. The exhibition, which includes 25
rarely seen oil paintings and two pastels, is the first to focus on O’Keeffe’s
painstaking choice of color, her studio methods, and her involvement in the
conservation of her work.
AN AMERICAN SEASON
Georgia O’Keeffe is not the only American artist getting special attention
at the Memorial Art Gallery.
From October 24 to December 24, the gallery also is hosting the exhibition My
America: Art from The Jewish Museum Collection, 1900–1955. Rescheduled
from last fall, the traveling exhibition includes 73 works by 40 American-Jewish
artists who explore their reactions to unprecedented freedoms and harsh economic
and political realities. The exhibition is organized into five sections: “Becoming
American,” “Striving for Social Justice,” “Picturing
Ourselves,” “Reacting to Tragedy,” and “Moving Toward
Abstraction.”
And in July, the gallery published its first catalog of its American collection.
Seeing America: Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of the Memorial
Art Gallery of the University of Rochester examines 82 objects and their
connections to American history, culture, literature, and politics.
The book includes 73 essays by gallery scholars and outside authorities who
explore works by some of America’s best-known artists, among them Thomas
Cole, Winslow Homer, John Sloan, George Bellows, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacob
Lawrence, and Andy Warhol. Marjorie Searl, the gallery’s chief curator,
served as editor-in-chief of the catalog.
The 336-page, coffee-table book is available in hardcover ($65) or softcover
($40) from the Gallery Store by calling (585) 473-7720, ext. 3057.
The gallery is the last of three museums in the country to host the exhibition
that was inspired, in part, by newly available correspondence between O’Keeffe
and her conservator. Organized by independent O’Keeffe scholar Sarah Whitaker
Peters and René Paul Barilleaux, curator at the McNay Art Museum and
former director of the Mississippi Art Museum, the show spent the summer at
the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the iconic figures in the history of
American art, and this particular exhibition reflects the depth and breadth
of her career,” says Grant Holcomb, director of the gallery.
The extent of O’Keeffe’s perfectionist labors—and her constant
experiments to better her craft—were documented in her 30-year correspondence
with conservator Caroline Keck. Selections from those letters are reproduced
in the exhibition’s catalog for the first time.
The exhibition also includes photographs of O’Keeffe on loan from the
International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House in Rochester.
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