Georgia O'Keeffe’s first solo museum exhibition opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943.
The exhibition marked an important institutional recognition of O'Keeffe’s work. By that time, she had established a major career through exhibitions in New York and had become known for large-scale flowers, abstractions, city views, and New Mexico subjects.
Chicago had a personal connection to her early education: O'Keeffe studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906. Her later solo exhibition at the institution therefore connected her mature reputation with one of the places where her formal training began.
This event is distinct from her 1946 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Chicago exhibition came first as a solo museum presentation, while the MoMA event was a retrospective surveying her career and was the museum’s first retrospective for a woman artist.