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The first exhibit to ever focus on Georgia O’Keeffe’s drawings will open at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on April 9, 2023. Set up on the museum’s third-floor south galleries, “Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time,” will stay on view through August 12, 2023.
Visitors will get to look through over 120 works developed over 40 years using charcoal, watercolor, pastel and graphite, among other materials. Included in that roster is “No. 8 - Special (Drawing No. 8),” from 1916, a “drawing [that] features a spiraling composition that would recur throughout the artist’s decades-long career,” according to an official press release about the upcoming exhibit. Fun fact: O’Keeffe named some of her pieces “specials” as an indication of her belief in their success.
“Drawing X,” from 1959 will also be on display. Made by the late artist the same year that she took a three-month trip around the world, the work “was inspired by the views of the landscape she witnessed from a plane.”
“O’Keeffe’s works on paper are the perfect expression of her belief that ‘to see takes time,’” said Samantha Friedman, MoMA’s associate curator, in an official statement. “She recognized the necessity of slowing down for her own vision and, in turn, her sequences of drawings invite us to take time in looking.”
This will be MoMA's first show devoted to the artist since its 1946 exhibit "Georgia O'Keeffe," which was actually the museum's first retrospective of a woman artist.
A darling of the art world even before her passing at the age of 98 back in 1986, O'Keeffe enjoys an outstanding fanbase in New York, in part thanks to the series of paintings of skyscrapers that she worked on in Manhattan between 1925 and 1929, when she moved into an apartment on the 30th floor of the Shelton Hotel (the now-permanently-closed New York Marriott East Side on Lexington Avenue and 49th Street) with her husband Alfred Stieglitz.
The apartment gave the artist expansive views of the city right around the time that a lot of skyscrapers were being built around town.