Alon Bement taught Georgia O'Keeffe at the University of Virginia.
O'Keeffe worked as a teaching assistant to Alon Bement in Charlottesville during the 1910s. Bement was connected with the ideas of educator and artist Arthur Wesley Dow, whose approach emphasized composition, line, color, and design rather than relying only on realistic representation.
This teaching period helped O'Keeffe move beyond the academic realism she had learned in art school. Dow's principles, transmitted through Bement and later through O'Keeffe's direct study, encouraged her to organize visual elements according to expressive design. Her experiments with abstraction in 1915 grew out of this shift.
William Merritt Chase and Arthur Wesley Dow were also important teachers in O'Keeffe's education, which makes this question easy to confuse. Chase taught her at the Art Students League, while Dow taught her at Columbia University Teachers College. Bement is the specific teacher associated with her work at the University of Virginia.