True to Nature

True to Nature celebrates the contributions of four painters all born in the 1880s—Georgia O’Keeffe, Ida O’Keeffe, Henrietta Shore, and Helen Torr—who shared the unique opportunities and challenges of women artists working in the early twentieth century. This group shared aesthetic priorities and explored the world around them through varying degrees of abstraction and expressive use of color. Nature afforded the ideal vehicle for self-expression and was mined to reflect their true self through similar subjects including plant forms, the landscape and other organic motifs like seashells. In addition to sharing artistic concerns, they had professional challenges in common as well. In the post-Armory Show era, the practitioners of modernism faced limited opportunities to exhibit their work, and women artists in particular dealt with circumstances adverse to gaining the public recognition they deserved. The female peers of leading modernist, Georgia O’Keeffe, struggled to find steady representation and support for their art. Her younger sister Ida apparently claimed that she’d have been famous if she had her own Stieglitz. Inspired to bring attention to the achievements of women modernists, True to Nature highlights the aesthetic kinship among these five innovative painters and the individual experimentation that led each to finding their own distinctive voice.