Long before her death in 1986 at the age of 98, Georgia O’Keeffe had become a cultural icon, America’s most famous woman artist. Buried in the O’Keeffe legends there are many unknown images, rarely discussed facts, and a troubling medical history. Judith Reynolds will discuss O’Keeffe’s precipitous rise to national prominence, her move to the American Southwest, and the way she navigated the seasons of her life.
Judith Reynolds is an arts journalist, art historian, and political cartoonist. After a career in academia, she switched to the for-profit world of newspaper journalism and eventually became arts, then managing editor of an upstate New York paper. In 1994, Reynolds and her late husband, David, moved to Durango where she began freelancing for the Durango Herald and teaching occasionally at Fort Lewis College.