Before becoming known primarily as a full-time painter, Georgia O'Keeffe worked as an art teacher.
After studying at the Art Students League, O'Keeffe worked briefly as a commercial artist and then developed a career teaching art. She taught in Amarillo, Texas, and later held teaching positions in South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. Teaching provided income while she continued developing her own work.
Her breakthrough came when Alfred Stieglitz exhibited her abstract charcoal drawings in New York in 1916. She moved to New York in 1918 and increasingly concentrated on painting, although her education and teaching experience remained important to her understanding of artistic structure and observation.
O'Keeffe was not trained as a botanist or architect, despite her close attention to flowers and buildings. Her flower paintings use enlarged forms and visual abstraction, while her New York skyscrapers reflect her experience of modern urban space rather than professional architectural practice.