Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887 and grew up on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. As a child she received art lessons at home, and her abilities were quickly recognized and encouraged by teachers.  O'Keeffe pursued studies at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League, New York, where imitative realism was taught. In 1908 she won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize. Shortly thereafter O'Keeffe quit making art, saying later that she had known then that she could never achieve distinction working within this tradition.

She then  studied under Dow, whose ideas offered O'Keeffe an alternative to imitative realism. In an attempt to discover a personal language through which she could express her own feelings and ideas, she began a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognized as being among the most innovative in all of American art of the period. She mailed some of these drawings to a former Columbia classmate, who showed them to the internationally known photographer and art impresario, Alfred Stieglitz, on January 1, 1916.

Red Canna	Sunflower, New Mexico	Red Poppy

Stieglitz began corresponding with O'Keeffe, who returned to New York that spring to attend classes at Teachers College, and he exhibited 10 of her charcoal abstractions in May at his famous avant-garde gallery, 291.  She and Stieglitz were married in 1924, and subsequently lived and worked together in New York (winter and spring) and at the Stieglitz family estate at Lake George, New York (summer and fall) until 1929, when O'Keeffe spent the first of many summers painting in New Mexico.