How is new art made? True innovation requires not just a lone visionary but a community united by a shared vision. Georgia O’Keeffe and American Modernism traces how American artists of the early 20th century set out to forge a modernism of their own, breaking with both established artistic traditions and European modernism.
Centered on the Alfred Stieglitz Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition brings together major works of American modernism from the first half of the 20th century by Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth, alongside works by key figures in modernist photography, including Paul Strand and Edward Weston.
The exhibition then shifts its focus to O’Keeffe’s creative world, highlighting her role as a central figure in American modernism and Stieglitz’s partner in both art and life. Particular attention is given to her later career in New Mexico. After first visiting the state in 1929, O’Keeffe spent nearly two decades traveling regularly between New York and New Mexico before moving there permanently in 1949. She remained in New Mexico for the rest of her life. The exhibition presents celebrated works inspired by what she discovered in the region, including animal bones and distinctive desert landscapes, along with works from her later years and photographic portraits of the artist.
The artists who formed the Stieglitz Circle in New York a century ago and helped open a new chapter in American art have long since passed, but their works and stories endure. Today, artists working in small studios and exhibition spaces continue to envision what comes next. Supporting one another as they venture down unfamiliar paths, they may one day be remembered as the voices who defined the new art of our time.
Organized in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, this exhibition will be presented at the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art from April to July 2027 as part of the MMCA Together.
Sponsored by Membership Society for the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, PharmaResearch Culture Foundation, U.S. Embassy Seoul
In cooperation with Association of Western Art History
Supported by Herman Miller, SPACELOGIC
