Barbara Buhler Lynes, a leading expert on Georgia O’Keeffe, recalls her initial fascination with the artist’s work. It was 1987, just a year after O’Keeffe’s passing, when Lynes, then a Renaissance art historian, attended the National Gallery of Art’s centennial exhibition dedicated to O’Keeffe. In a conversation with Hyperallergic, she shared how the display of numerous paintings and drawings, including early abstract pieces, prompted a question fueling her extensive research: “Why did she move away from abstraction, the cutting edge of American art, to more traditional representational imagery?” Motivated by O’Keeffe’s creations and life story, Lynes authored the definitive catalogue raisonné in 1999 after examining 2,029 pieces personally.
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Lynes was the inaugural curator, has now transformed her scholarly work into a digital format on a free online platform named Access O’Keeffe. This tool allows users to explore images of O’Keeffe’s body of work, including paintings, handwritten correspondences, and early sketches from various institutions and private collections worldwide. Visitors to the site can filter works by color, medium, and theme. According to Liz Neely, the museum’s curator of Digital Experience who spoke with Hyperallergic, the digital archive’s concept was envisioned a decade ago.
Neely, who led the development of Access O’Keeffe, which launched in February with Lynes’ consultation, explained the hurdles faced, such as a shortfall in federal arts funding under President Trump. The museum had secured a $243,570 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for the project, but $100,000 was withdrawn. Before the museum could cover the deficit, a lawsuit filed by attorneys general ensured the restoration of funds. Neely emphasized that educators, artists, scholars, and O’Keeffe researchers form the platform’s main audience, with additional benefits for authors, curators, and filmmakers.
In the decades since her initial encounter with O’Keeffe’s work, Lynes expressed enthusiasm for the digital platform’s potential to advance her scholarship into the digital realm and facilitate new insights. “It’s a mechanism that allows search potential in a way that is really quite revolutionary and revelatory,” Lynes stated.
