SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO: The City of Santa Fe has declared 2007
the Year of Georgia O'Keeffe.
One of the most important artists of the 20th century, 
O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was devoted to creating imagery that
expressed what she called "the wideness and wonder of the world
as I live in it." She was a leading member of one of the
avant-garde art movements that blossomed in New York in the
1910s and 1920s.
The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, in Santa Fe, opened in July
1997, 11 years after the death of the artist. Since then, the
museum has welcomed more than 1,700,000 visitors from all over
the world.
O'Keeffe's images-often instantly recognizable as hers-include
large-scale flowers, New York cityscapes, animal bones, and the
high deserts and dramatic cliffs of her beloved New Mexico.
The museum's collection of more than 139 O'Keeffe paintings,
drawings, and sculpture, including promised gifts and extended
loans, is the largest in the world. In addition, the museum
presents special exhibitions that are either devoted entirely
to O'Keeffe's work or her American modernist contemporaries.
The museum and its research centre are both Pueblo
Revival-style buildings located two blocks from the historic
Santa Fe Plaza.
The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum will host Moments in Modernism:
Paul Strand, Southwest, Sept.  22, 2006 through Sunday,
Jan. 14, 2007.
In this exhibition, curator Anthony Montoya brings together 35 photographs by Paul Strand (1890-1972), one of America's pioneers of modernist photography. Each of its photographs was completed in the summers of 1930 through 1932, when Strand was living and working in New Mexico.
In the first decade of the 20th century, Strand began studying
photography in New York. In the 1910s and 1920s, he discovered
and was greatly inspired by the ideas and work of photographer
Alfred Stieglitz, and the two became close friends.
Strand was friends with O'Keeffe, who was also a great
admirer of his work. Like O'Keeffe, Strand was fascinated with
the unusual character of the indigenous architecture of New
Mexico, as well as its striking terrain. Both made these the
subjects of their work in the summer of 1930, when both spent
the summer in and around Taos.
The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum 10th Anniversary Committee is
planning numerous community events, including a kickoff event
Nov. 15, 2006, in celebration of O'Keeffe's birthday.
Santa Fe is a city of 65,000, making it the third largest city in New Mexico after Albuquerque and Las Cruces. The city is located at an elevation of 7,000 feet above sea level at the base of the southern Rocky Mountains in the north-central part of the state. Founded in 1610, Santa Fe is the second oldest city in the United States and is considered both the highest and oldest capital city in America.
