Georgia O'Keeffe attended high school in Madison, Wisconsin, before pursuing formal art studies.
O'Keeffe attended Madison Central High School, where her artistic abilities were recognized and encouraged. She graduated in 1905. Her education in Madison followed an earlier childhood in Sun Prairie and helped prepare her for study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
After Chicago, she attended the Art Students League in New York, where she studied under William Merritt Chase. These institutions gave her conventional training in drawing, painting, and composition. O'Keeffe later moved beyond the academic approach she had been taught, but that training remained an important part of her early development.
Madison is sometimes overlooked because O'Keeffe is more closely associated with New York and New Mexico. New York was central to her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz and her early exhibitions, while New Mexico became the setting for many later paintings. Madison, however, was the Wisconsin city where she completed high school.