Naro Expanded Cinema and the Chrysler Museum of Art are co-hosting a screening of the documentary “Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light,” 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Naro.
O’Keeffe is considered one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, known for her large and bold abstract paintings of flowers, bones and landscapes.
Oscar-winning director Paul Wagner said in an artist’s statement that he and his wife, who is also his producing partner, saw an exhibition of O’Keeffe’s work in 2018. They learned that O’Keeffe once thought of giving up the idea of becoming an artist. Yet, she made her way in a male-dominated field to become the “Mother of American Modernism.”
Wagner said in the statement that the last American feature documentary on O’Keeffe was made in the late 1970s. However, scholarship and research on the artist have since been published, including more than 20,000 pages of letters between O’Keeffe and her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who died in 1946.
“A new, comprehensive documentary about her life and art seemed not just possible, but necessary,” Wagner wrote.
Actor Claire Danes is the voice of O’Keeffe, with narration by actor Hugh Dancy.
Wagner will have a Q&A session at the screening.
Wagner lives in Charlottesville and teaches at the University of Virginia, where O’Keeffe took art classes beginning in 1912. She met teacher and artist Arthur Wesley Dow, who inspired her thoughts on art and her purpose as an artist.
She had other connections to Virginia, including the family living in Williamsburg when she was a teen and her attending boarding school in Chatham.
O’Keeffe began her career in 1920s New York and, in the 1970s, moved to New Mexico, which ushered in another consequential body of work. O’Keeffe died in 1986.