New York City hosted the 1946 Georgia O'Keeffe retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
The exhibition was a major institutional recognition of O'Keeffe's work and made her the first woman to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA, founded in New York in 1929, had become one of the leading museums for modern art in the United States. The retrospective presented O'Keeffe as a significant modernist rather than merely as a painter of flowers.
O'Keeffe had strong personal and professional ties to New York. Alfred Stieglitz showed her work in his galleries there, and the city was central to the development of her early reputation. The 1946 exhibition nevertheless covered more than her New York paintings, including abstractions, flowers, and works connected with the Southwest.