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Melissa B. Rooney

The Beyond- Georgia O'Keeffe and Contemporary Art: Through Jan 20 at the NC Museum of Art

Updated: Apr 29, 2019




Georgia O’Keeffe is one of my favorite artists, so imagine my delight when I learned of the new NC Museum of Art exhibit entitled The Beyond- Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art! This vast display of spectacular paintings from currently working artists embodies the unique but gentle artistic approach of Georgia O’Keeffe and those sensitive souls who have come after her. You will leave feeling at peace.


From NC Museum of Art curator, Linda Dougherty:


“The beyond is the title of one of Georgia O'Keeffe’s last paintings, and it's one of the final paintings you see when you walk through the exhibition. It was painted toward the end of her career, and it was painted after she started to lose her vision. Georgia O'Keeffe is thinking about what is beyond for her- what is beyond her vision, what’s beyond her life, at the end of her life. The painting is an abstracted horizon landscape based on O'Keeffe's memories of looking out airplane windows.





"There are 20 contemporary artists in the exhibition. They are from all over the United States- from big cities like NY and LA, as well as from smaller towns from the Midwest and the South. There are 14 women and 6 men in the exhibition and a diverse range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds and really diverse approaches to making art, working in a wide variety of media. The premise of the exhibition is really about how these contemporary artists, decades and generations after O'Keeffe was painting, are still exploring ideas that she was interested in.


"The exhibition is laid out in themes. There are groupings that focus on Flowers, on Still Life’s, on the Landscape. And you will see contemporary artists who are interested in the same ideas that Georgia O'Keeffe was interested in: this kind of blurring of abstraction and representation, focus on the beauty of the Natural world, the emotive powers of color, the direct observation of the world around you. I would not say there is a 1:1 correlation; you’re not going to say, “Oh, that contemporary artist’s work goes with this Georgia O'Keeffe painting.” But you will see the similarities they have in the way they approach their artwork.”




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