Georgia O'Keeffe Timeline

1887 November 15: Georgia Totto O’Keeffe born to Francis Calyxtus O’Keeffe and Ida Totto O’Keeffe at family dairy farm, near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, the first girl and the second of seven children, including Francis Calyxtus (1885-1959), Ida Ten Eyck (1889-1961), Anita Natalie (1891-1985), Alexius Wyckoff (1892-1930), Catherine Blanche (1895-1987) and Claudia Ruth (1899-1984).

1905-1906 Fall 1905: Attends School of The Art Institute of Chicago.

1907-1908 Fall 1907-spring 1908: Attends Art Students League, New York. June 1908: Awarded League’s 1907-1908 Still Life Scholarship. Summer 1908: As scholarship winner, attends League’s Outdoor School at Lake George, New York.

1908-11 Fall 1908: Moves to Chicago to work as freelance commercial artist. Around 1910: Becomes ill with measles and moves to Charlottesville, Virginia, to live with mother, sisters and brothers, who moved there from Williamsburg sometime in 1909.

1912 Summer: Attends drawing class at University of Virginia, Charlottesville, taught by Alon Bement, of Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. August: Moves to Amarillo, Texas, as supervisor of drawing and penmanship in public schools; holds position through spring 1914.

1913 Summer: Returns to Charlottesville to work as Bement’s assistant at University of Virginia (and continues to teach there summers through 1916).

1914-15 Fall 1914: Enrolls at Teachers College, Columbia University. Fall 1915: Moves to Columbia, South Carolina, to teach art at Columbia College. October 1915: Produces seminal series of charcoal abstractions; sends examples to her friend in New York, Anita Pollitzer.

1916 January: Pollitzer takes O’Keeffe’s drawings to Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 gallery in New York on New Year’s Day. March: O’Keeffe returns to Teachers College. May 1: Mother dies in Charlottesville; O’Keeffe attends funeral the following day. May 23: Stieglitz opens group show at 291 that includes 10 O’Keeffe charcoal drawings. June: O’Keeffe in Virginia to teach with Bement. Late August: Moves to Texas to teach at West Texas State Normal College, Canyon. Stieglitz includes O’Keeffe work in group show at 291.

1917 April 3: Stieglitz opens “Georgia O’Keeffe,” first one-person show of her work, at 291.

1918 Late February: O’Keeffe takes leave of absence from teaching and moves to Texas. June 10: Moves to New York. July 8: Stieglitz leaves Emmeline Obermeyer Stieglitz, his wife since 1893, to live with O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe resigns from West Texas State, accepting Stieglitz’s offer to underwrite a year of painting. November 11: O’Keeffe’s father dies in Petersburg, Virginia.

1919 November: O’Keeffe and Stieglitz spend summer and fall at Lake George (a pattern that continues until 1929, when O’Keeffe starts working part of nearly every subsequent year in New Mexico).

1920 March: Makes first of many trips to York Beach, Maine. December: In New York, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz move into house of Stieglitz’s brother, Leopold, at 60 East 65th Street and live there winters through 1924.