The work of O'Keeffe and her contemporaries laid the groundwork for the idea that women artists possess a powerful creativity equal to that of men.

Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, and grew up on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. As a child she received art lessons at home, and her abilities were quickly recognized and encouraged by teachers throughout her school years. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O'Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist.

O'Keeffe pursued studies at the Art Institute of Chicago (1905–1906) and at the Art Students League, New York (1907–1908). In 1908, she won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot). Shortly thereafter, however, O'Keeffe quit making art, saying later that she had known then that she could never achieve distinction working within this tradition.

Her interest in art was rekindled four years later (1912) when she took a summer course for art teachers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, taught by Alon Bement of Teachers College, Columbia University. Bement introduced O'Keeffe to the then revolutionary ideas of his colleague at Teachers College, artist and art educator Arthur Wesley Dow.

Dow believed that the goal of art was the expression of the artist's personal ideas and feelings and that such subject matter was best realized through harmonious arrangements of line, color, and notan (the Japanese system of lights and darks). Dow's ideas offered O'Keeffe an alternative to imitative realism, and she experimented with them for two years, while she was either teaching art in the Amarillo, Texas public schools (1912-14) or working summers in Virginia as Bement's assistant.

O'Keeffe was in New York again from fall 1914 to June 1915, taking courses at Teachers College. On September 22, 1915 she began teaching art at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina, and she decided to put Dow's theories to the test. She began a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognized as being among the most innovative in all of American art of the period. This series of drawings launched her artistic career, including one of her most famous, Drawing 13.

When O’Keeffe arrived in South Carolina, her chief hope for her new job was that it would give her enough time to think and develop her own work. The teaching load was not heavy, four lectures on design per week and the rest studio time when she had only to supervise students. Little did she know that, in fact, this small, sleepy, college suburb would be the scene of the crucial imaginative breakthrough that would set her on the road to becoming the country’s most important woman artist.

O’Keeffe’s initial impressions of Columbia College were pretty grim. Founded in 1856 by Methodists as a two-year school for music teachers, the campus had repeatedly been devasted by fire, most recently in 1909. Located in College Place, then at the end of a two-mile trolley line from Columbia, the college’s financial situation was as desperate as its physical condition. Because of the falling price of cotton, enrollment had plummeted; in 1915 there were 150 students and only ten faculty to teach them.

As O’Keeffe had dreaded, there was little intellectual companionship. However, she did enjoy the company of Music Professor J. H. Earnshaw and English Professor James Milton Ariail and their families; however, when she tried to explain modern art to her colleagues they laughed at her, and when she showed them her work they found it "crazy." By mid-October O’Keeffe was settling in and beginning to take intense pleasure in the rural beauty of her surroundings. She started taking long walks, sometimes with students and sometimes alone.

On January 1, 1916 O'Keeffe mailed some of her charcoal drawings to a former Columbia classmate, who showed them to the internationally known photographer and art impresario, Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz began corresponding with O'Keeffe, who returned to New York that spring to attend classes at Teachers College, and he exhibited 10 of her charcoal abstractions in May at his famous avant-garde gallery, 291, which O’Keeffe knew he would do, but was uncertain of when. A year later, he closed the doors of this important exhibition space with a one-person exhibition of O'Keeffe's work. In the spring of 1918 he offered O'Keeffe financial support to paint for a year in New York, which she accepted, moving there from Texas, where she had been affiliated with West Texas State Normal College, Canyon, since the fall of 1916. By the time she arrived in New York in June, she and Stieglitz, who were married in 1924, had fallen in love and subsequently lived and worked together in New York (winter and spring) and at the Stieglitz family estate at Lake George, New York (summer and fall) until 1929, when O'Keeffe spent the first of many summers painting in New Mexico.

From 1923 until his death in 1946, Stieglitz worked assiduously and effectively to promote O'Keeffe and her work, organizing annual exhibitions of her art at The Anderson Galleries (1923–1925), The Intimate Gallery (1925–1929), and An American Place (1929–1946). As early as the mid-1920s, when O'Keeffe first began painting New York skyscrapers as well as large-scale depictions of flowers as if seen close up, which are among her best-known pictures, she had become recognized as one of America's most important and successful artists.

Three years after Stieglitz's death, O'Keeffe moved from New York to her beloved New Mexico, whose stunning vistas and stark landscape configurations had inspired her work since 1929. Indeed, many of the pictures she painted in New Mexico, especially her landscape paintings of the area, have become as well known as the work she had completed earlier in New York. Indeed, her ability to capture the essence of the natural beauty of northern New Mexico desert, its vast skies, richly colored landscape configurations and unusual architectural forms, has identified the area as “O’Keeffe Country,” Indeed, the area nourished O’Keeffe’s creative efforts from 1929 until 1984, when failing eyesight forced her into retirement. She lived either at her Ghost Ranch house, which she purchased in 1940, or at the house she purchased in Abiquiu in 1945. She made New Mexico her permanent home in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death, and continued working in oil until the mid–1970s. She worked in pencil and watercolor until 1982 and produced objects in clay from the mid-1970s until two years before her death in 1986, at the age of 98.

To learn more about her days in South Carolina visit virtual.clemson.edu/caah/women/gok/GOKSC2.htm

Georgia O'Keefe taught at the Columbia College in 1915-1916,
and lived as a guest of the Ariail’s in the Ariail house during those years.

Drawing Number 8	Drawing Number 13
White Trumpet Flower
Georgia O'keefe 1918	Georgia O'keefe 1919
	Dennis Brack photo of O'keeffe 1977
Georgia OÕKeeffe pictured with her husband, Alfred Stieglitz.