Making It New and Keeping It Old: Recasting Frameworks and Contexts in Georgia O’Keeffe Studies

Abstract

Three recent Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition catalogues devise new interpretative frameworks and situate O’Keeffe in new contexts that are especially relevant to American Studies scholars interested in visual culture, material culture, gender studies, reception studies, and modernism. One places O’Keeffe in the company of other white women making modernist art in the early decades of the twentieth century; another provides critical interpretations that acknowledge and reject previous views that were skewered by monolithic gender and sexual lenses; and a third moves O’Keeffe into popular culture domains such as fashion, consumerism, and interior design. Raising questions about how curators present and shape artists’ legacies, as well as how they translate exhibitions into book form, these catalogues offer opportunities to explore new directions in O’Keeffe scholarship, such as an internationalizing trend and a turn to interdisciplinary American Studies methodologies.