Color! Lecture Series | Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George: Enduring and Reveling in Green with Erin M. Coe

Join us for The Rockwell’s next presentation of the Color! lecture series with our new executive director, Erin M. Coe.

Coe will present on Georgia O’Keeffe (1883-1986), considered one of the great colorists of modern times. Her celebrated paintings display dramatic and vibrant hues that glow with vitality and emotion. Color was so central to her creative practice that she once stated, “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way.”  This presentation by Erin Coe, who curated the nationally acclaimed exhibition Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George in 2013, will discuss how the iconic artist reckoned with the color green during her years at Lake George, New York.

Beginning in 1918 until 1934, O’Keeffe spent much of the summer and fall in the southern basin of the famed Adirondack Lake at the family estate of Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). With few exceptions, O’Keeffe stayed at Lake George from spring to fall and delighted in the colors of spring and autumn while discovering new subject matters. She enjoyed long walks through the wooded hillsides and hikes up Prospect Mountain to take in the spectacular view of the lake’s mountain-rimmed waters. Though O’Keeffe often described reveling in the greenery of the Adirondacks, at times she bemoaned having to “endure the green.” Coe’s lecture will also consider the other vivid seasonal colors that O’Keeffe encountered at Lake George, as well as early black and white drawings featured in a rare lithographic portfolio in The Rockwell’s collection.