What can I learn from Georgia O’Keefe in 2025?

In 2025, Georgia O’Keeffe feels startlingly present—not just as an artist, but as an attitude. Her life and work, once framed neatly in art history textbooks, now read like a manifesto for our restless, distracted age. O’Keeffe’s refusal to be rushed, her insistence on looking deeply—at a flower, a bone, a desert hill—offers a kind of visual mindfulness that our scrolling thumbs could learn from.

When she painted an iris so close-up it became an abstract universe, she wasn’t being decorative; she was teaching us to see. That lesson is more radical now than ever. O’Keeffe reminds us that attention itself is an act of rebellion. In a century that prizes immediacy, her discipline—rising before dawn in the New Mexican silence, chasing the curve of a cloud with her brush—feels like a quiet form of resistance.

We can also learn from her independence. O’Keeffe managed to orbit around, but never be consumed by, the gravitational pull of Alfred Stieglitz. In 2025, when conversations about women’s autonomy and authorship are finally more nuanced, her story reads less like a feminist footnote and more like a blueprint. She made her life her studio—pared down, purposeful, surrounded by the wild geometry of the desert.

Most of all, O’Keeffe teaches us courage: the courage to edit our lives until only the essential remains, and the courage to love beauty without apology. Looking at her work today, one can’t help but think she foresaw our cultural fatigue and offered a cure. “Take time,” her paintings whisper, “and look closer.” In 2025, that’s not nostalgia—it’s prophecy.