Curator, Samantha Friedman: The Palo Duro series is a series of works O’Keeffe made in visiting a canyon of that name in Texas. She wrote:
Actor (Georgia O’Keeffe): “In the Canyon I climbed. It was all rough—but it was great. . . . It’s all so big—big washes—big hills—long drops—thick trunked scrubby cedars. . . . I love it . . . I want it all.”
Curatorial Assistant, Emily Olek: O'Keeffe was born in a very flat place, Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. When that’s your surrounding growing up, anytime you see mountains or canyons, you're awestruck by them. She’s able to focus in on different parts that maybe someone who grew up with it would simply pass by.
Samantha Friedman: She jots down the overall forms of this canyon in a series of small sketches that you can see in a case here, and then she translates them, reduces them, looks at them vertically and horizontally.
Emily Olek: In her oil painting for the series, the walls of the canyon reach up like a border for the painting in a way that abstracts it. You wouldn’t know that those are the walls of a canyon.
Samantha Friedman: Ultimately, she extracts the key forms that she sees in the landscape, presenting them in a way that seem almost entirely abstract.