Georgia O’Keeffe was captivated by architecture, as a landmark new show at the Detroit Institute of Arts proves

For an artist most associated with her renderings of the natural world – flowers, landscapes and bones – it is perhaps nonintuitive to consider architecture as a constant in Georgia O’Keeffe’s career.

Indeed, ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture,’ which opens today at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is the first exhibition concerned exclusively with the artist’s relationship to the built environment. As the show ably demonstrates through an assembly of 36 paintings spanning almost 40 years of O’Keeffe’s career, architecture was a fundamental and perennial fascination for this painter-of-flowers.

The show was passionately cultivated by curator Benjamin W. Colman, who developed the concept from the sole O’Keeffe painting in the DIA’s permanent collection: Stables (1932). The work in the Barns section of the exhibition, which collects paintings developed mostly in relationship to upstate New York, particularly Lake George, to which O’Keeffe frequently sojourned from the city.

One of the earlier pieces in this section, My Shanty, Lake George (1922), provided an important talking point for O’Keeffe. Her exploration of colour, form and architecture in this painting was, among other things, a response to the sexism and pigeonholing that would attend her long and singular career in an extremely male-dominated profession.

‘I can paint one of those dismal-coloured paintings like the men [e.g. Arthur Dove, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley and Paul Strand],’ O’Keeffe said, in a recollection captured by the Phillips Collection, regarding Shanty. ‘I think just for fun I will try – all low-toned and dreary with the tree beside the door.’

‘Dreary’ seems a harsh characterisation for any of the pieces in the show, which continue over two more sections, focused on the architecture of New York and New Mexico, respectively. The works are united in their formality, and perhaps more strictly figurative than some of O’Keeffe’s trademark subjects – as if turning up the volume on the 'objectivity’ aspect of the dialectic she famously outlined between objectivity and abstraction. Nonetheless, even in her imagery of a city undergoing an industrial revolution and hyper-phallic building boom, there is undeniable emotionality and sly yonic detail in paintings like New York Street with Moon (1925) and Abstraction (1926).

The exhibition comes home, appropriately, to the Southwest, where O’Keeffe settled into her New Mexico environs. This includes her Ghost Ranch homestead, whose patio door was a famous point of obsession in her later works. Here, the curators have provided some charming immersive elements, including a 360-degree video panorama of her Ghost Ranch courtyard, and a hands-on drawing area featuring 3D-printed models and midcentury modern furnishings that were hallmarks of O’Keeffe’s eclectic New Mexico living spaces.

This section offers the viewer much opportunity to meditate on O’Keeffe’s sense of place, from The House I Live In (1937), to the tender, bodily details of her various Ranchos Church renderings, to her patio door. ‘That door was what I bought the house for,’ O’Keeffe says in a video at the entrance of the exhibition.

In a final nod to its lingering importance, the exhibition closes out with a black-painted corridor, a gesture to the portal that held such lingering fascination, with a final work Ladder to the Moon (1958) hanging wistfully in the dark, seemingly pointing the way toward the infinite.

‘Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture’ is on view from 11 September 11, 2026 – 3 January, 2027 at the Detroit Institute of Arts.