Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities Exhibition Opens at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum on May 23rd

Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities
May 23 - September 7, 2008

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum is pleased to present Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities, an exhibition that brings together, for the first time, approximately 97 works by two of America’s best-known artists. The exhibition demonstrates the Museum’s ongoing commitment to presenting O’Keeffe’s work together with that of her contemporaries, and to defining her achievement within the context of American Modernism (1890s–present).

O’Keeffe and Adams met in Taos, New Mexico, in 1929, an encounter that initiated a lifelong friendship. In 1933, Adams traveled for the first time from California to New York, where he met O’Keeffe’s husband, Alfred Stieglitz, the éminence grise of American Modernist photography. The three became friends, and on subsequent trips to New York, Adams always visited and spent time with Stieglitz and O’Keeffe.

Adams and O’Keeffe shared a profound appreciation of the natural world. In 1937, they traveled with other friends to explore sites in the Southwest, and in 1938, O’Keeffe and others joined Adams for a pack trip in the Yosemite High Sierra. O’Keeffe and Adams wrote one another from time to time, and portions of Adams’s last visit with O’Keeffe, at her Abiquiu house in 1981, were included in Ansel Adams: Photographer (1981), a documentary film of his life and art.

During their lifetimes, O’Keeffe and Adams became two of America’s most celebrated icons. This exhibition—the first exploration of these artists together and of the significance of their achievements in capturing the reality and essence of the world around them—clarifies the various parallels between their distinctive visions of the natural world.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is located at 217 Johnson Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico.