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7/2/2002

Places of Their Own

National Museum of Women in the Arts - NMWA, Washington

Three great 20th-century artists of North America: Emily Carr of Canada, Georgia O’Keeffe of the United States, and Frida Kahlo of Mexico, searched for meaning in the landscape and in the cultures surrounding them. In doing so, they helped create a new identity for North American art. The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) will present the exhibition Places of Their Own: Emily Carr, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Frida Kahlo from February 8 to May 12, 2002, to explore the fascinating intersections of these legendary artists.

The exhibition will offer a rare opportunity for U.S. audiences to see Carr’s sweeping, spirit-infused landscapes, O’Keeffe’s varied exploration of the natural world, and Kahlo’s self-portraits and lesser-known works. The 62 works on view will draw parallels in the art, careers, and national identities of these three artists, who were only peripherally aware of each other’s work. The exhibition establishes three key connections among the artists - nature, culture, and the public self - with works by each artist appearing in each group.

All three artists saw life linked together in a continuum, and they often envisioned nature as female. In O’Keeffe’s sensuous red hills and Carr’s painting of totemic female forest spirits, that identification is highly visible. For Kahlo, intimacy with the natural world was often expressed through the inclusion of animal and plant forms in her self-portraits and still-life subjects.

The artists took an active interest in indigenous people, their nature-based spirituality, and the interplay of colonialism. They explored the use of design elements, the healing power of religion, and cultures as keys to a primordial spirit of place. And they struggled to find authenticity in their lives, to overcome illness and to achieve personal wholeness. Their complex efforts to define themselves through their art led to work that - either overtly or in hidden ways - functions as self-portraits.

Artist biographies

Emily Carr (Canadian, 1871-1945) is one of the most celebrated figures in Canadian culture, a position due equally to her outstanding modernist landscape paintings and to her writings. Carr, orphaned in her mid-teens, attended the California School of Design and taught art to children before pursuing further art training in Britain and France. In 1899, she began travelling into frontier areas of her home province of British Columbia to develop a visual record of Northwest Coast Indian villages and totem poles. Smitten with the freedom and beauty of the landscape, she forged a style that would forever define the wilderness and native people of British Columbia in the Canadian consciousness.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986) is not only America’s most popular woman artist, she is also probably the best-known American modernist of the first decades of the 20th century. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in New York at the Art Students League and the Columbia University Teachers College. Her work was championed and exhibited by photographer Alfred Stieglitz; they married in 1924. O’Keeffe spent more and more time away from New York, and eventually moved to New Mexico, where she spent much of the rest of her life. Throughout her career, O’Keeffe’s work varied between representation and abstraction, both inspired by nature.

Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907-1954) began to paint during her extended convalescence following a serious injury in a streetcar accident. Her paintings, mostly self-portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, fuse an astounding variety of visual forms with her own brand of symbolism. Her stormy and passionate relationship with muralist husband Diego Rivera, as well as her pain and suffering, provided the subject matter of most of her work. As communists and supporters of the Mexican Revolution, she and Rivera rejected European influences and looked instead to Mexico’s rich cultural heritage for artistic inspiration.

Places of Their Own: Emily Carr, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Frida Kahlo is organized and circulated by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Toronto, Ontario. Exhibition curator is Dr. Sharyn Udall of Santa Fe, New Mexico. A companion book by Udall is for sale in the museum shop

The National Museum of Women in the Arts, founded in 1981 and opened in 1987, is the only museum dedicated solely to celebrating the achievements of women in the visual, performing, and literary arts. Its permanent collection contains works by more than 800 artists, including Judith Leyster, Maria Sibylla Merian, Mary Cassatt, Camille Claudel, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Elizabeth Catlett, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Louise Bourgeois.

Image: Georgia O'Keeffe, Red Hills with the Pedernal, 1936

The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) 1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington
It is open Monday-Saturday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. and Sunday noon - 5 p.m.
For information call 202.783.5000.

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