The 291 gallery first showed Georgia O'Keeffe's abstract charcoal drawings in 1916.
Alfred Stieglitz organized the exhibition after seeing a group of O'Keeffe's drawings. He displayed them at 291, his Fifth Avenue gallery in New York, marking her first public exhibition in the city.
These drawings were among the earliest works through which O'Keeffe developed a personal language of simplified forms and expressive abstraction. They helped establish her reputation before she became especially famous for flowers, bones, and New Mexico landscapes.
The venue is often confused with the 1913 Armory Show, a major exhibition that introduced many Americans to European modernism. O'Keeffe did not first show these charcoal drawings there; their key early venue was Stieglitz's 291 gallery.