When I began searching for pieces for this blog piece I started with looking at looking at various visual artists I wrote about in the writing assignment such as Jean Crotti, Salvador Dali, and Pieter Mondrian. After deciding that none of these artists struck a particular interest of mine, I began looking over the artists listed on the course website and saw Georgia O’Keeffe. Perfect! I was just at an art exhibit in the Denver Art Museum two weeks ago that had a showcase highlighting some of her works from the early modern era. This assignment would be so much more interesting using pieces that I have actually seen in person, but now the problem was how to connect one of them to topic listed for the assignment. This will be covered later in this post.
The exhibit presented in Denver focused on Georgia O’Keeffe’s time in New Mexico after her husband Alfred Stieglitz died in 1946 and New Mexico became her permanent home (pbs.org). The showcase consisted of American Indian artworks, such as katsina tithu figurines, to provide viewers with an up-close look at the various cultural artifacts that O’Keeffe was exposed to during her time in New Mexico (denverartmuseum.org). These paintings provide a great insight for the start of the Precisionist movement that O’Keeffe was such a prominent part of (Wikipedia.org). If you would like to view more of the paintings from this exhibit they are listed available on the Denver Art Museum website that is listed below under the sources.
Precisionism was born as a result of the country experiencing a psychological reaction to the mass destruction wrought overseas by the First World War and the economic hardships of the Great Depression (Metmuseum.org). This reaction resulted in the United States starting to create its own sense of nationalism and isolationism to increase war moral and support for the cause of the wars overseas. Precisionism itself was the result of critics pointing out that the United States had no cultural identity of its own, but aided by the arts, the expansion into the west and increasing interest in American folk art that became the focus of Americans during the time. These branching interests of the American public and the natural beauty of the surrounding environment pushed O’Keeffe’s influences and help broaden her success as an artist.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory, 1938 New Mexico
I have never actually been to New Mexico, but just from the exhibit and paintings by O’Keeffe I was able to gather just how desolate and plain the expansion into the West really had been. Yet at the same time O’Keeffe was able to show the desolation, she enhances the natural beauty of all things around her through her painting style. To me this painting embodies the ideas surrounding Old West, influences of the depression and WW1, and the cultural American Indian art work. It incorporates culture of the American Indians because of the importance of spiritual domain of things that are long gone, while at the same time integrating the American need to shape its own identity through artifacts and traditions.
Sources:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/georgia-okeeffe/about-the-painter/55/
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/prec/hd_prec.htm
http://www.denverartmuseum.org/exhibitions/georgia-okeeffe-new-mexico
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz#Last_years_.281938.E2.80.931946.29
http://whitney.org/ForKids/Collection/GeorgiaOKeeffe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precisionism
spmurphy2013 
I have noticed your blog from the start, and thought that it was an attractive site. I thought that I would stop by and comment on your current piece. I was a little familiar with O’Keeffe through my photography and knowledge of Alfred Stieglitz. I liked your information, and tend to agree with your opinions on O’Keeffe and her paintings. Do you know if O’Keeffe had any specific reason to use the morning glory with the piece you showed, or was it just a flower chosen at random? One little grammatical error: in the first line you have the phrase “looking at” listed twice. All in all a nice look at an interesting piece of art. Thank you for sharing!