Three Hoosier Connections to Georgia O'Keeffe

The work of Georgia O’Keeffe is featured in a huge exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art through February 15, 2015.
One of her most important paintings is already in Indy.
At almost seven feet square, Jimson Weed is the largest in a popular series of flower paintings by O’Keeffe. It has been in the IMA’s permanent collection since Eli Lilly and Company bought it from cosmetics executive Elizabeth Arden and donated it.
She studied under Hoosier artist William Merritt Chase.
As a young artist in New York, O’Keeffe learned brushwork from the Nineveh native, one of the country’s foremost Impressionists. Chase also mentored such young luminaries as Edward Hopper and Marsden Hartley.
She was friends with the IMA’s president in the 1940s.
Caroline Marmon Fesler was an art collector and head of the Art Association of Indianapolis, which would become the IMA. She was a friend of O’Keeffe’s and purchased the artist’s Pelvis with the Distance and Grey Hills for the museum.
 
Photo courtesy Indianapolis Museum of Art