Open MINDS Institute with Angela Miller, PhD, "Becoming Georgia O'Keeffe: The Making Of An American Icon" - Tuesday, February 1 at 12:00 PM

Georgia O’Keeffe was perhaps the most famous American artist before Jackson Pollock. O’Keeffe’s experience as a woman would shape her public reception. This class will look at how O’Keeffe emerged into an expressive new language of organic abstraction and how she managed her fame, asserting her own voice amidst the clamor of male critics who denied her claims to creative autonomy and saw in her work the expression of the “eternal feminine.”

Dr. Angela Miller earned her doctorate in American Studies from Yale University. Her teaching and research interests encompass American arts and visual culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on the arts and nation-building, the history of American landscape painting, American modernism, and queer modernities. Miller is the author of Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825 - 1875, which won awards from the American Studies Association and from the Smithsonian American Art Museum; and lead author, along with Janet Berlo, Bryan Wolf, and Jennifer Roberts, of American Encounters: Cultural Identity and the Visual Arts from the Beginning to the Present (Pearson, 2008). Her recent article “Vibrant Matter: The Countermodern World of Pavel Tchelitchew” was published in the Art Bulletin in June 2020. Her current book project — supported by the National Gallery, the Met, and the National Endowment for the Humanities — focuses on the queer artists and writers anchored by Lincoln Kirstein in the years around World War II.