A young artist so nauseated by rigid academic training that turpentine made her physically ill quit painting for four years, then created work that would one day sell for over forty-four million dollars. This deep dive traces how a Wisconsin dairy farmer’s daughter, Georgia O’Keeffe, continually reinvented herself and shed every restrictive label imposed on her.

We follow her from award-winning realism through the abstract charcoals that reached Alfred Stieglitz, the explosive New York years, and her escape to the New Mexico desert. Along the way she battled Freudian misreadings of her flowers, corporate advertisers, and, later, the loss of her own eyesight, all while insisting she be judged simply as an artist.

• How Arthur Wesley Dow’s principles let her translate feeling instead of copying
• Stieglitz exhibiting her secret charcoals without permission
• Her fight against the sexualized reading of her magnified flowers
• The ‘pineapple rebellion’ against the Hawaiian Pineapple Company
• The feminist paradox behind her rejection of the label ‘woman artist’