The exhibition at The High Museum in Atlanta highlights the artistic exploration of Georgia O’Keeffe, renowned for her images of flowers and Southwestern landscapes. During her prolific career, O’Keeffe devoted several years to investigating the built environment of New York City. In 1924, she moved into the newly constructed Shelton Hotel, which was then the tallest residential skyscraper in the world. This towering structure inspired a five-year period of energetic experimentation across various media, scales, subject matters, forms, and perspectives.
O’Keeffe created street-level compositions that captured the monumental skyscrapers of the city from below, as well as suspended views looking down from her 30th-floor apartment. She referred to these works as her “New Yorks,” using them to explore the dynamic potential of the city’s landscape—contrasting the organic with the inorganic and the natural with the constructed.
The High Museum serves as the exclusive venue in the Southeastern United States for this important exhibition, which is the first to seriously examine O’Keeffe’s paintings, drawings, and pastels of urban landscapes. It also positions these works within the broader context of her diverse compositions from the 1920s and early 1930s. The presentation argues that O’Keeffe’s urban works are not outliers in her practice but are integral to her modernist inquiry during the 1920s, connecting her abstractions and still lifes created at Lake George to her later works following her arrival in the Southwest in 1929. Understanding O’Keeffe’s “New Yorks” is essential to fully appreciating her evolution as the artist known today.
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