Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Unveils Free Digital Catalogue Raisonné Platform

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico launched Access O'Keeffe, a free digital catalogue raisonné platform, in February. This comprehensive online resource digitizes Barbara Buhler Lynes's definitive 1999 catalogue raisonné, which documented 2,029 works. Users can browse images of O'Keeffe's paintings, handwritten letters, and early sketches from institutions and private collections worldwide. The platform allows sorting by color, medium, and theme while providing updated provenance and exhibition information. Liz Neely, the museum's curator of Digital Experience, led the decade-long development effort in consultation with Lynes. The project faced funding challenges when a $243,570 Institute of Museum and Library Services grant was terminated, with $100,000 unpaid, following federal arts funding cuts. A lawsuit filed by attorneys general against IMLS resulted in restored funding last year. The platform targets educators, artists, scholars, researchers, authors, curators, and filmmakers. Lynes, the founding curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and preeminent O'Keeffe scholar, first encountered the artist's work at the National Gallery of Art's 1987 centennial exhibition. Her initial question about O'Keeffe's shift from abstraction to representational imagery launched decades of scholarship. The digital tool follows similar initiatives like Van Gogh Worldwide but offers unique search capabilities that Lynes describes as revolutionary and revelatory.