Image: Detroit Institute of Arts
Dr. Cody Hartley, director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, will speak at the Detroit Film Theatre on Wednesday, September 30, at 6 p.m. The event is listed as a talk focused on O’Keeffe’s relationship to the spaces surrounding her.
Hartley’s talk will trace how O’Keeffe lived with, altered, and built the spaces around her, including homes and studios shaped to support her art-making. Those spaces functioned as forms of self-expression and framed her world for continual observation, study, and inspiration.
Architecture runs through O’Keeffe’s art from her earliest childhood sketches to her final works, not merely as subject matter but as a way of seeing and understanding. Her architectural subjects included the gleaming towers of new Manhattan skyscrapers, the broad sides of rural barns, and adobe homes in New Mexico.
The lecture is related to the exhibition ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture,’ on view from September 11, 2026, through January 3, 2027. The exhibition presents approximately 35 architectural paintings created from the 1920s through the 1960s.
O’Keeffe returned repeatedly to architectural subjects in the same powerful, abstract style she used for her well-known depictions of flowers and desert landscapes.
