Four (More) Modern Women: O’Keeffe’s Contemporaries

Georgia O’Keeffe may be the most famous American woman artist of the twentieth century, but there were definitely others working and breaking boundaries at the same time.

This class is an introduction to four other female artists based in New York between 1900 and 1940: Peggy Bacon, Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, Isabel Whitney, and Florine Stettheimer. Each artist had her own signature subject and style, from Bacon’s scenes of bohemian life to Whitney’s depictions of a changing Brooklyn, from Stettheimer’s colorful family portraits to Eberle’s realistic sculptures of immigrants. Yet these women shared similar challenges, balancing their creative output with family life, other employment, and/or commitment to social causes. In this session we’ll look at works from these four artists and learn how they negotiated the opportunities and constraints of their era.

Teacher: Jessica Murphy