What was Georgia O'Keeffe's first major one-woman museum exhibition?

Georgia O'Keeffe's first major one-woman museum exhibition was a retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943. The exhibition recognized her achievements across abstraction, flowers, landscapes, and architectural subjects.

O'Keeffe had already received important gallery exposure through Alfred Stieglitz, but a museum retrospective carried a different institutional significance. It presented her career as a substantial body of work rather than as a series of individual modernist experiments.

The Chicago exhibition was especially meaningful because O'Keeffe had studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago earlier in her life. Her professional path had therefore come back to an institution connected with her training.

Later museums organized major exhibitions of her work, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Those later surveys should not be confused with the 1943 Chicago retrospective.