The 1916 New York gallery that first displayed Georgia O'Keeffe's abstract charcoal drawings was 291.
The drawings reached Alfred Stieglitz through Anita Pollitzer, a friend of O'Keeffe who brought them to his attention. Stieglitz selected several for exhibition at his gallery, where their radical simplification and expressive lines stood out from conventional academic art.
This event is widely treated as O'Keeffe's breakthrough into the professional art world. She was then working as an art teacher, and the charcoal series represented a major shift from the representational exercises associated with her earlier schooling.
The exhibition also began O'Keeffe's long association with Stieglitz. Although he promoted her work, O'Keeffe resisted being reduced to a subject of his photographs or to a single artistic label. Her later career included abstraction, flowers, urban views, bones, and New Mexico landscapes.