The innovative aspect of the exhibition Places of Their Own: Emily Carr, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Frida Kahlo, showcases the works of Emily Carr (1871-1945, Canadian), Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986, American), and Frida Kahlo (1907-1954, Mexican), who achieved legendary stature in their native countries. Each secured an artistic reputation as her nation’s outstanding woman painter of the 20th century. Collectively, their work gives form to a mythos of North America, linking region and nationality to larger forces at work in Western consciousness.
The exhibition lies in its effort to build associations, through gathering and juxtaposing a wide range of works. When taken as a whole, the exhibition explores these artists’ sense of self and of place as related to nature, culture, and the construction of personal mythologies. Carr, O’Keeffe, and Kalua rooted themselves in a part of the Americas and reinvented the image of that place in their paintings. The process of that transformation is their ultimate subject and their most radiant achievement. The exhibition probes the unique accomplishments and complex identities developed within lives imprinted with courage, passion, and integrity.
Born in an era when definitions of social, artistic, and sexual roles were changing, Emily Carr, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Frida Kalua inherited a late 19th-century crisis of cultural authority, which included an increasing sense of fragmentation of both self and society. Ideas about autonomy, form, and causality were questioned everywhere, from physics to art to the new psychology. Within this context, these three women artists looked to nature and their own native cultures for ways to counter this fragmentation. While seeking careers as professional painters, they grappled with change and ambiguity, remaining sensitive to tradition even as they explored modernity and modernism in their work.
![An installation image of an exhibition space with several paintings hung on walls. The paintings to the left are hanging on a sage green wall.](https://nmwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/rg8-sg1-s5-b36-f2-s-009_22287.jpg)
Installation view of Places of Their Own: Emily Carr, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Frida Kahlo
The Artist,
Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe was an American painter whose drawings and paintings of abstract forms, flowers, bones, and the New Mexico landscape mark her as a significant modernist painter.![A black-and-white photograph of a light-skinned older woman. Standing in front of stacked wood, she is posed from the waist up with her head turned to the left in profile. She has grey hair pulled up into a large bun. She wears a blazer with a large abstract brooch.](https://nmwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/O_keeffe-Georgia.jpg)
The Artist,
Frida Kahlo
Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is known for creating striking, often shocking, self-portraits that reflected her political ideology, cultural identity, and her turbulent personal life.![The artist stands in a stage-like space framed by white curtains. Beneath black hair woven with red yarn and flowers, heavy brows accent her dark-eyed gaze. Clad in a fringed, honey-toned shawl; long, pink skirt; and gold jewelry, she holds a bouquet and a handwritten letter.](https://nmwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Kahlo-Frida.jpg)