SALEM – The Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum has been extended due to popular demand.
Titled “Art, Image, Style,” the show presents one of America’s most iconic artists in a new light.
It is the first exhibition to explore O’Keeffe’s modern aesthetic and distinctive self-styling by presenting her paintings with her never-before-exhibited handmade garments and photographs of the artist, the museum said.
Through 125 works, the show examines how the renowned artist crafted her public image. The national touring exhibition is on view for an extra week in Salem through April 8.
“For more than 70 years, Georgia O’Keeffe shaped her public persona, defied labels and carved out a truly progressive, independent life in order to create her art,” said Austen Barron Bailly, the museum’s curator of American Art, in a statement. “O’Keeffe recognized that how she dressed and posed for the camera could signal an alliance between her attire, her art, and her home. Her aesthetic legacy of organic silhouettes, minimal ornamentation and restrained color palettes continues to capture the popular imagination and inspire leading designers and tastemakers of today.”
O’Keeffe died at the age of 98 in 1986.
Rejecting the conservative Victorian world into which she was born, art historians say O’Keeffe absorbed the progressive principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which promoted the idea that everything a person made or chose to live with should reflect a unified and visually pleasing aesthetic.
“O’Keeffe drew no line between the art she made and the life she lived,” said Wanda Corn, guest curator, in a statement. “She strove to make her life a complete work of art, each piece contributing to an aesthetic whole.”
Throughout her life, O’Keeffe had strong opinions about how she wanted to look, no matter what the dress codes of the era dictated, the museum said. O’Keeffe’s aesthetic sensibility can be traced from her school age rebellion against women’s clothes to her New York years in the 1920s and ’30s when a black-and-white palette dominated much of her art and dress, to her later years in New Mexico, when her art and clothing changed in response to the Southwestern landscape.
Whether sewn by O’Keeffe herself, custom made, or bought off the rack, she consistently favored the simple lines and abstract forms that also reverberated through her artwork and home design.
On Friday, April 6, the regular price of admission will be reduced to $15 from $20 and the museum will stay open until 9 p.m.
