The 1915 series of charcoal drawings called Specials established Georgia O'Keeffe as an abstract artist.
O'Keeffe made the series while teaching in South Carolina and working through ideas about line, movement, and form. The drawings reduced visual experience to powerful curves and shapes rather than representing recognizable objects in a conventional way.
She sent some of these drawings to Anita Pollitzer, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz exhibited them at his gallery 291 in 1916, making O'Keeffe one of the first American artists to work in a purely abstract mode.
O'Keeffe later destroyed many early works because she disliked the way critics interpreted them, especially claims that her abstractions were symbolic of female anatomy. The surviving drawings nevertheless remain central evidence of her early modernist breakthrough.