Art AV Club: Georgia O’Keeffe

I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole recently, like you do. I took an online class and one of the bonus materials was a video about Cy Twombly. After I watched it, I wondered if there were videos on other Abstract Expressionists. And just like all trips down the YouTube rabbit hole, I surfaced several hours later awed by the amazing content and looking for snacks.

Since social media doesn’t allow for easy sharing of this kind of material, I decided to make it a recurring feature on my blog. And just like that, Art AV Club was born! On Mondays, I’ll be posting videos of or about artists and sharing a bit about why what they do intrigues me. I hope you’ll go on this journey with me. Georgia O’Keeffe is considered the Mother of American Modernism and she is my pick this week for Art AV Club.

PBS interview with Georgia

We’ve got three videos this week. I really try to keep these short because I know we have the attention span of a goldfish but these three are still only about 15 minutes long. They are all from a PBS interview with O’Keeffe while she was still alive. It is so wonderful to soak in her confidence as a painter. In these videos she seems to effortlessly shoulder the work of being a visionary. I was spellbound by her talking about what captured her attention and how she worked.

Just a heads up: In the last video she uses an outdated term for Native Americans. It bumped me so I wanted to let you to know it was coming.

Me and Georgia

In 2018 we took spring break and went out west. We landed in Santa Fe and then made a circle around the states around the Four Corners area, hitting Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, the Petrified Forest and several other places along the way.

Seeing the land when I’d heard about it all my life was a revelation. Georgia talks about how the air is different and the sky is different. It really is. I loved it so much.

We visited the Georgia O’Keeffe museum and I really connected with the work in a way I hadn’t before. She was clearly a visionary in a time when women weren’t allowed to do much and visionary was certainly not part of that. I talk more about the work I made after that trip in this post and the Handprint Series is what came out of that time.

Go exploring on your own

I hope you enjoyed this Art AV Club and that it leads you to further explore Georgia O’Keeffe’s work. The O’Keeffe museum website is a phenomenal place to start! For extra credit this week, you can check out this video that I posted just after I visited the museum. In it you can hear her talk more about New Mexico.

I’ll be bringing another artist next week so check back on Monday. If there’s an artist you’d like my take on, drop me a note and I’ll put them on the list!