Legacy of the Land: Georgia O’Keeffe and Emily Kame Kngwarreye
July 10, 2024 – January 31, 2025
Jackson Hole, WY
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that this page contains images of a deceased person.
ABOUT
In the first display to place Georgia O’Keeffe and Emily Kame Kngwarreye side-by-side, the show asks us to compare the artists to ponder questions about the history of landscapes, the development of Modernism in Western and non-Western art history, and the marginalization and centering of women in art. Even considering the artists on their own terms, we are keenly aware of asking how our own cultural perspectives color our understanding of Georgia O’Keeffe and Emily Kame Kngwarreye.
While separated by several decades and by geography, both artists were deeply tied to the lands they depicted. By using landscapes as the lens to examine both artists, we can appreciate their unique visual languages, the commonalities between them, and their contributions to the histories of art. There is a growing resonance between them; both artists have recently gained institutional attention in Europe with O’Keeffe’s retrospectives at Tate Modern (2016) and Centre Pompidou (2021) and Kngwarreye’s retrospective also at Tate Modern (2025). Both painters expanded the role of women, and in Kngwarreye’s case for Aboriginal women, in a space more often afforded to men. In showing Kngwarreye with O’Keeffe, we hope to continue examining Kngwarreye at the same international status and prominence that she deserves.
Carl Van Vechten, “Portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe, New York”, 1936, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-116606
Emily Kame Kngwarreye
“Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my efforts to create an equivalent with paint color for the world, life as I see it.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
NEW MEXICO IN THE AIR
Few artists are as associated with New Mexico as Georgia O’Keeffe. The American Southwest filled O’Keeffe’s imagination and her canvases. O’Keeffe captured the uniqueness of the area’s geologic and cultural features while transforming the visual language of Modernism.
After a 1929 visit to Taos, New Mexico, O’Keeffe would summer in the state each year before moving there permanently in 1949. The New Mexican landscape allowed O’Keeffe to explore the boundary between representation and abstraction. With the state’s dramatic landscape and desert colors, O’Keeffe found a vehicle through which to manipulate scale, fragment imagery, modulate lines and to experiment with colors, inviting the viewer to reconsider everyday objects and environment.
O’Keeffe’s representations of flowers, trees, bones, and the desert landscape continue to influence artists and are foundational to the history of American and Modern art.
For more about O’Keeffe, visit our educational page Who is Georgia O’Keeffe: A Flowering Genius.
Similar Paintings in Museum Collections
“We the Warlpiri tribe of the central Desert, want the outside world to know that our traditions have never collapsed. We want to show the people of Paris that our culture is as modern as today.” – Magiciens de la Terre
THE DREAMING
Is our Western art history framework sufficient to comprehend Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s work and career? How do we place Kngwarreye within an international status without removing her from a community, one that places value on the collective environment? These are just some of the questions that confront us as we examine her paintings but in keeping these issues in the back of our minds, we can approach her painting with a deeper understanding and appreciation.
Kngwarreye was an Anmatyerre Elder born in 1910. The Anmatyerre are an Aboriginal people of Australia in the Northern Territory. As an Elder, Kngwarreye had the responsibility to continue and pass on cultural knowledge to future generations. In the 1970s, Kngwarreye moved back to Utopia Station and attended adult education classes where she picked up batik making. It was only in 1988 at the age of approximately 78 that she began working with acrylic paint.
Kngwarreye’s international career takes place in the wake of two important, groundbreaking exhibitions: Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and The Other Story at the Hayward Gallery in London, both in 1989 and only a year after Kngwarreye began painting in acrylic. These exhibitions opened the public to understanding the modernity of art outside of a Western perspective and to the idea that there is not a singular art history but histories plural. It is in this environment that Kngwarreye’s art could be appreciated as Modern.
There may be a certain ease to compare Kngwarreye to Abstract Expressionists particularly as there is a shared love of mark-making but it is imperative to remember that the mark-making emerges from two completely different historical and cultural backgrounds. Kngwarreye spoke almost no English and had never had any contact with Western art history, especially the Abstract Expressionists.
Instead, Kngwarreye’s mark-making speaks to both her own cultural and geographic history; her paintings of dots go beyond an accumulation, they create a topography, almost as if they depict Australia’s ‘red-earth’. Kngwarreye also developed amidst the emergence of the Indigenous art in Pupunya. This community, which continues today, introduced materials including acrylic paint, while ensuring that artists could continue telling their Dreaming stories.
The Dreaming represents the Australian Aboriginal worldview and beliefs, covering concepts, knowledge, and relationships between people, plants, animals, natural environment in the past, present, and future. It is from this worldview that Kngwarreye created paintings encompassing not just a system of beliefs but integrating the environment with the landscapes of her canvas. Kngwarreye’s major Dreaming story was a specific yam that grows beneath the ground and is visible above ground as a creeper. Her paintings evoke the physical nature of the plant and the ancestral connections that transcend the literal.
Even within her short career, there are distinct shifts in her approach to mark-making, whether going from Batik to acrylic or mixing paint directly onto the canvas. In another example, the changes in the tendrils of yams were later detached to become curvilinear lines.
With this in mind, we can come to understand that post-contact art, particularly Kngwarreye’s oeuvre, is within a long tradition while also being innovated. We can conceive Kngwarreye’s work, and by extension the art developed by Aboriginal Australians, as both enduring and changing, constantly evolving as any art and cultural tradition changes over time. In this way, we can reject the label often applied to Kngwarreye as “the impossible Modernist” but instead to respect and appreciate her as simply a “Modernist”, one of both national and international importance.
Similar Paintings in Museum Collections
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, “Edunga”, 1990, acrylic on canvas, Tate Collection, London
© Estate of Emily Kame Kngwarreye / DACS 2024, All rights reserved
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, “Untitled”, 1992, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
© Estate of Emily Kame Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, “Yam Story”, 1996, acrylic on canvas, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISCOPY, Australia
“This sovereignty is spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’… this link is the basis for the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished and co-exists with the Sovereignty of the Crown.” – Uluru Statement from the Heart
ABSTRACT LANDSCAPES?
The two paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and Emily Kame Kngwarreye tell different histories of Modernism and landscapes in the 20th century. However, by bringing the works together, we can better understand each piece individually while also attaining a larger picture of art history and cultural production.
On the surface, the careers of the two artists seem at odds. O’Keeffe enjoyed a long career over many decades but created only 616 oil on canvas works. On the other hand, Kngwarreye did not start painting until 1988 when she was about 78 but in only 8 years painted nearly 3000 paintings, averaging one painting per day and matching the entire output of Monet. Nevertheless, in a more fundamental way, their legacies map onto the trajectory of art history, which in recent decades has burgeoned at the periphery. Before moving to New Mexico, O’Keeffe was at the center of the New York art scene and in her transcontinental move, helped establish a thriving art scene in the desert. Kngwarreye’s ascendancy in the international art scene followed the landmark exhibitions Magiciens de la Terre and The Other Story which opened new possibilities in the narratives of art.
It is in this juxtaposition of these two artists that we can look afresh at these towering figures and to consider their art practice as a part of something new that exists within a longer tradition. We begin to understand that Modernism in the United States and in Australia was and is always there. Modernity, in terms of art history, then fluxes between a monolithic, singular Modernism and independent, plural Modernisms.
Carl Van Vechten, “Portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe, New York”, 1936, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-42493
Emily Kam Kngwarray near Mparntwe in 1980
Looking at both O’Keeffe and Kngwarreye, it becomes apparent that landscapes are embedded in a shared cultural heritage. In the case of O’Keeffe, landscapes shape our understanding of what it means to be American. For Kngwarreye, landscapes are continuation of a larger, millennia long tradition, which informed her mark-making even as she revolutionized what that mark-making could be.
This exhibition is an opportunity to see the nuances of each artist that arise by comparison while also placing them in the larger conversation of art history. Landscapes become a lens to see the intersection of abstraction, Modernism, and culture in a new way. Each artist’s unique vision and revolutionary approach to art looms larger through these cultural dialogues.
Throughout we have spelled the artist’s name as Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Her name is alternately spelled Emily Kam Kngwarray.
To see Georgia O’Keeffe in another artistic dialogues, this time in conversation with a friend working in a different medium, visit our exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Modern Art, Modern Friendship.
“Through her unparalleled talent and deep cultural connections, Kngwarray’s works transcend time, inviting audiences to explore the spiritual landscapes and ancestral narratives woven intricately within each stroke.” – Nick Mitzevich, director of the National Gallery of Australia
INQUIRE
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
“The Exhibitionists | Emily Kam Kngwarray” from the National Gallery of Australia
“Points of View: Emily Kam Kngwarray Anwerlaar anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming) from the National Gallery of Victoria
“Emily Kam Kngwarray and Utopia Art Centre” from the National Gallery of Australia
“How to see more and care less: The art of Georgia O’Keeffe” from TED-Ed
“Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Virtual Tour” from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
ARTISTS
