This is a virtual program. 

How might we account for the creative outpouring that marked Georgia O’Keeffe’s years at Lake George, an interval that stands among the most prolific of her seven-decade career? A survey of her work from this period reveals an astonishing abundance: roughly two hundred paintings on canvas and paper, accompanied by numerous sketches and pastels.

Lake George functioned for O’Keeffe as a potent site of artistic stimulus. Many of the botanical subjects that would come to define her oeuvre first took shape in this site. As a retreat from New York City, it afforded not only sustained contact with the natural world but a deep sense of place, an anchoring essential to her developing modernist vision. Yet it was not solely a refuge; Lake George also operated as a social nexus, animated by a continuous circulation of visitors.

Within this multifaceted setting, O’Keeffe pursued new subjects while reckoning more deliberately with thoughts of selfhood and artistic independence, including the imagined prospect of a studio of her own. This presentation examines the forces that shaped her Lake George years: her evolving subjects, the shifting social dynamics around her, and the ways in which the site itself nourished her creative practice.

Yaritza Martinez Pule joined the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in 2022 as Curatorial Assistant after completing a Fulbright research grant. Previously, she was a curatorial research fellow at Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City and a curatorial assistant at 80WSE Gallery, a gallery affiliated with New York University where she co-curated and organized exhibitions with the Institute of Fine Arts, the Costume Institute, and Steinhardt’s Department of Art. In addition, she was a visiting scholar in the archives at Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. She holds an MA from New York University where she concentrated her research on the historical and cultural dimensions of textiles, and a BA from Marquette University with a focus on Art History, Digital Media Studies, and Spanish and Latin American Studies, completing a part of her art history education from King’s College London. Most recently, Yaritza curated A Circle that Nothing Can Break, an exhibition examining the ways in which Georgia O’Keeffe’s unique vocabulary of round forms intersected with feeling, memory, and lived experience.