The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a major Georgia O'Keeffe retrospective in 1970.
The exhibition was significant because it presented the work of a living American woman artist at a major museum and helped prompt renewed critical attention to O'Keeffe. By then, her career had already spanned more than six decades and included abstraction, flowers, skyscrapers, bones, and Southwestern landscapes.
The retrospective took place after O'Keeffe had achieved wide recognition, but before the major feminist art-history reassessments of the 1970s fully reshaped discussions of women artists. Its timing helped establish her as a central figure in American modernism rather than merely as a painter of flowers.
This event is distinct from later exhibitions and from the Whitney's founding exhibitions. O'Keeffe also had important retrospectives at other institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, but the Whitney retrospective is associated with 1970.