Specials was the title associated with Georgia O'Keeffe's first large-scale abstract charcoal drawing series. She made these works in 1915 while teaching in South Carolina.
The drawings marked a decisive break from the representational academic art she had studied earlier. Instead of depicting recognizable objects, O'Keeffe used curved lines, angular shapes, and areas of intense black to explore visual rhythm and emotion.
She sent some of the drawings to her friend Anita Pollitzer, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz exhibited them at his 291 gallery in 1916, despite O'Keeffe's initial reluctance to have them shown publicly.
The series helped establish her as an important new voice in American modernism. O'Keeffe continued to move between abstraction and recognizable subjects, but the 1915 charcoal drawings remain crucial evidence of how early and boldly she pursued a personal modernist language.