Georgia O'Keeffe: Visions of Hawai'i

FAIN: GI-256174-17

New York Botanical Garden (Bronx, NY 10458-5126)
Joanna Groarke (Project Director: January 2017 to January 2026)

Implementation of a traveling exhibition and public programs exploring the historical and ecological contexts surrounding artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s commercial art commission by the Hawaiian Pineapple Company in the late 1930s.

Funds will support an Implementation Grant for the exhibition, Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of Hawai’i (May 12-October 28, 2018) and a two-year public humanities position. Portions of the show will travel to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (Tennessee). This exhibition will use a lesser-known body of work by Georgia O’Keeffe as the entry to an examination of Hawai’i’s complex ecological and cultural history—one that is often obscured by romanticized views of the Islands. This show will include two major exhibitions—an art-historical installation of all 20 of O’Keeffe’s Hawai’i paintings as well as drawings and sketches, and a horticultural exhibition that introduces visitors to the “three floras” of Hawai’i—and smaller exhibitions on the cultural and ecological significance of plants that figure prominently in the Islands’ history, the Islands in commercial art, and O’Keeffe’s journey through Hawai’i. Public and children’s education programs will complement these components.