Georgia O'Keeffe became the first woman to receive a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented the exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe, organized by curator Alfred H. Barr Jr. It recognized the scale and importance of her career after decades of exhibitions, critical debate, and growing public attention. The show helped place her work within the institutional history of American modernism.
The exhibition took place shortly after the death of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, in July 1946. O'Keeffe had already achieved major recognition before the MoMA show, but the exhibition confirmed her importance to a leading modern-art museum. A frequent error is to identify 1946 as the year she first exhibited anywhere; she had shown work publicly much earlier, including at Stieglitz's gallery in New York. The distinction here is MoMA's first one-person exhibition for a woman artist.