Screening of Georgia O'Keeffe: the Brightness of Light

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE: THE BRIGHTNESS OF LIGHT

Dir. Paul Wagner

120min, USA, 2025

Tuesday, January 28, 7:00pm

Violet Crown 5

Academy Award-winning director Paul Wagner trains his lens onto one of the most influential American artists of the 20th-century. Prior to achieving her fame, Georgia O'Keeffe spent every summer from 1912-1916 taking art classes at the University of Virginia, where she rekindled her joy and desire to pursue painting, which she had considered giving up altogether.

Spiritually replenished, "The Mother of Modernism" headed for New York, upending the 1920s art scene with groundbreaking paintings of flowers, bones, and the splendor of the natural world. Denying her work depicted sexual imagery, she also posed nude for controversial photographs taken by Alfred Stieglitz. In the 1970s, isolated in the New Mexico desert, O'Keeffe emerged as a second-wave feminist icon.

Weaving together a fascinating and complicated story of an artistic life lived to the fullest, this essential biography features narration by Hugh Dancy and Claire Danes, and music by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (All of Us Strangers, Living).

Followed by a conversation with director Paul Wagner and UVA Art History Professor Elizabeth Turner.

Presented with Community Partner The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA.