Santa Fe, New Mexico - The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, hosts “Georgia O’Keeffe: Color and Conservation” through September 10, 2006.  In this revolutionary exhibition, co-curators Sarah Whitaker Peters and René Paul Barilleaux explore the degree to which O’Keeffe was involved in the conservation of her art and the importance of her personal relationship with distinguished conservator Caroline Keck.

“Georgia O’Keeffe: Color and Conservation” brings together 39 landscapes, flower paintings, still lifes, and abstractions—from all periods of the American master’s celebrated career—allowing the viewer to see the subtle beauty and diversity of her painting methods.

Sarah Whitaker Peters did her preliminary research for this exhibition at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, which houses the extensive collection of art materials owned by Georgia O’Keeffe at the time of her death, in 1986: her easel, glass palette, oil paints, brushes, pencils, pens, charcoal sticks, conté crayons, pastels, and wooden tools, as well as many types of watercolor and drawing papers.  In addition, the collection includes hundreds of paint chips that O’Keeffe made, beginning in the 1930s, by applying a color to a small piece of canvas or canvas board and identifying the components of the specific color on the back of the canvas or board.  All of these materials are available to those carrying out research at the Research Center.

“O’Keeffe was keenly interested in how her works looked throughout her life—that they continued to keep the original intentions of her craft,” says Peters.  “She became actively engaged in attempting to preserve the original colors and pristine surface qualities of her paintings, working closely with Keck.”

“The conservation of paintings remains in a largely secretive realm, for the most part distant from the typical museum visitor and even further from the minds of most artists,” adds cocurator René Paul Barilleaux.  “Georgia O’Keeffe, unlike the majority of her artist-colleagues, understood very well how shoddy craftsmanship and improper care could impact the long-term physicality of her paintings and pastels.”

“ ‘Color and Conservation’ is the first exhibition to focus on O’Keeffe’s lifelong commitment to the preservation of her work, her studio methods, and her desire to keep her work looking as it had when she first completed it,” says Barbara Buhler Lynes, Curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and The Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.  “It is also the first exhibition to explore O’Keeffe’s personal friendship with Caroline Keck through a series of previously unknown letters the two exchanged, and how they worked together to achieve O’Keeffe’s objectives.”

In addition to paintings and pastels, photographs of the artist and displays of some of the extensive body of letters Keck and O’Keeffe wrote to one another will add distinctly human and personal elements to the exhibition.  Many of these letters are published for the first time in the exhibition catalogue, thus adding to the fact that “Georgia O’Keeffe: Color and Conservation” establishes an entirely new body of scholarship on O’Keeffe’s professional career. 

Following exhibition in Santa Fe, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Color and Conservation” will travel to the Memorial Art Gallery, in Rochester, New York. A 167-page, full-color book of the same title accompanies the exhibition and is available at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Shop.

Visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum at : www.okeeffemuseum.org/