The Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe has unveiled an exhibition titled, "Carr, O'Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own" that showcases the work of three renowned female artists from each country in North America.
The show features work by Emily Carr of Canada, Georgia O'Keeffe of the United States and Frida Kahlo of Mexico. The exhibition displays 20 to 25 works by each of the artists, all of whom became the outstanding female painters in their respective countries. The exhibition includes correspondence, journals and statements by each artist.
The three women were painters who achieved legendary stature in their native countries. Each maintained her status as her country's outstanding female painter of the century.
The artists rooted themselves as part of the culture of the Americas and reinvented the image of that place through their paintings.
Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall is the guest curator for the exhibition that focuses on women's identity as complex and nuanced - a product of both inherited cultural fact and of social construction. Udall has undertaken detailed studies of these identity issues as they relate to nationality, nature, gender, creativity and the construction of a personal mythology.
The exhibition reveals what was unique about each artist and how their lives were marked with courage, passion and integrity. The show is running in Santa Fe in the first of only two U.S. venues.
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Carr is a painter and writer and is regarded as a major Canadian artist for her paintings of Western Coast Indians and landscape. While teaching art in Vancouver, British Columbia, Carr made frequent sketching trips to British Columbian Indian villages.
Her work had little financial success and was interrupted for long periods by her attempts to earn a living. After poor health ended her painting trips, she turned to writing, producing six autobiographical books that were enlivened by satiric character studies.
O'Keeffe was one of the foremost painters in 20th-century American art. She grew up and attended schools in her hometown of Sun Prairie, Wisc., and, from 1902, in Williamsburg, Va.
Determined from an early age to be a painter, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York, and afterward she supported herself by doing commercial art..
Her style is typified in such paintings as Black Iris (1926) and Cow's Skull, Red, White and Blue (1931). O'Keeffe painted her best-known works in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, but she remained an active painter into the '80s. Her later works frequently celebrate the clear skies and desert landscapes of New Mexico.
Kahlo was known for her intense, brilliantly colored self-portraits painted in a primitive style. Though she denied the connection, she is often identified as a surrealist. She was married to muralist Diego Rivera.
In 1925, Kahlo was involved in a bus accident that so seriously injured her that she had to undergo 35 medical operations. During her slow recovery from the trauma, Kahlo taught herself to paint and the pain she endured is reflected in her work.
She showed her early efforts to Rivera, whom she had met a few years earlier, and he encouraged her to continue to paint. After their marriage, Kahlo traveled with Rivera, who had received commissions for murals from several cities in the United States.
In 1943 she was appointed a professor of painting at La Esmeralda, the Education Ministry's School of Fine Arts. Her house in Coyoac†n, Mexico, is now the Frida Kahlo Museum.
"Carr, O'Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own" runs through Jan. 6 at the museum, which is at 107 West Palace Ave. in Santa Fe. The museum charges $5 for a one-day museum pass, $1 on Sundays for New Mexico residents with state identification and is free for those 16 years of age and younger and on Fridays from 5-8 p.m.
For more information, call (505) 476-5072.
