Georgia O’Keeffe en Puerto Rico

A prominent Puerto Rican painter and graphic artist of the twentieth century, Báez contributed to the development of San Juan’s art scene through her work and teaching. In this print, she portrays the American modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), aged and here standing with her back to the viewer as she contemplates the distant horizon. The textured surface differentiates the sand from the sky; the dull-blue color palette is calming and visually integrates O’Keeffe within the seascape, a habitat far from her New Mexican home. Báez here pays homage to a pioneering woman artist and, at the same time, places her within Puerto Rico, perhaps allowing Báez to position herself—and Puerto Rican artists, at large—within a shared American lineage of landscape painting.

Text credit: Produced in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and by Morgan Fitrell.