The best places to see the incomparable Georgia O’Keeffe’s art in the United States.
LessThe Cleveland Museum of Art, arguably one of the best museums in the country, is home to a number of O’Keeffe’s flower paintings and photographic portraits of the artist by Alfred Stieglitz and William Clift.
MoMA is home to 13 works by O’Keeffe, including forays into abstract painting like “Abstraction Blue,” made in 1927. “I decided to start anew,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote to a friend in 1915, according to MoMA, “to strip away what I had been taught — to accept as true my own thinking.”
The Art Institute of Chicago holds over 22 Georgia O’Keeffe paintings, including flower paintings and those of shells and bones. The Institute was also the site of the artist’s first retrospective, in 1943.
The National Gallery of Art holds 31 paintings and drawings by O’Keeffe, including her famous series depicting the Jack-in-the-pulpit wildflower.
The SFMOMA houses O’Keeffe’s 1944 piece titled “Black Place I,” a part of a larger series modeled after a remote area near her home in New Mexico. When asked what she liked about this place, the “Black Place,” she replied with a laugh “What is it I like about it? It’s an especially fine place to climb around in.”
The Carter is a home for American art in Fort Worth’s Cultural District. Here you can find a few of O’Keeffe’s oil on canvas paintings, with the earliest from 1918 to the latest being from 1955. Using the New Mexican landscape as inspiration, these works shed light onto O’Keeffe’s home and imaginative process.
The Milwaukee Art Museum holds 13 of Georgia O’Keeffe’s precious pieces, from her more abstract “Blue B” to her more literal “Horizontal Horse's or Mule's Skull with Feather.” Journey to this Milwaukee gem for a wide selection of the artist’s work.
As the oldest continuously-operating public art museum in the U.S, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford is as great a place as any to celebrate O'Keeffe's work. The museum holds the artist’s 1929 work, “The Lawrence Tree,” but to see the real pine tree the piece was modeled after, you’ll have to head to the D.H. Lawrence Ranch in New Mexico.
For an experience devoted entirely to O’Keeffe — her art, as well as her inspiration and spirit — visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in her home base of New Mexico. With over 3,000 of the artist’s work, and even access to her homes and studios at the Abiquiu location, this museum provides an in depth look into the artist and her life.
The Brooklyn Museum’s collection boasts 14 of Georgia O’Keeffe pieces, with one even being her 1949 painting of the Brooklyn Bridge. While this specific work is not currently on view at the museum (though it can be seen on their website), there are three O’Keeffe paintings for viewing in person: “Black Pansy & Forget-Me-Nots,” “Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills,” and “2 Yellow Leaves.”