I'm Keely Orgeman, the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

We are looking at Georgia O'Keeffe's painting entitled "Bob's Steer Head," painted in 1936. The title refers to Georgia O'Keeffe's friend and a fellow resident of Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico. Georgia O'Keeffe moved to a house on Ghost Ranch in 1934, and about the same time, Robert Wood Johnson II and his wife, Maggie, moved to Ghost Ranch, and they built a house on that property.

This, in some ways, could be considered a symbolic portrait, and O'Keeffe would have been aware of the tradition of symbolic portraiture among her fellow modernists, including those portraits made a decade earlier by Charles Demuth, which are on view in the same gallery. They include a symbolic portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe that Demuth made of the artist. Whether this painting, "Bob's Steer Head," refers to Robert Johnson II, is a question.

Today we often think about O'Keeffe's work from the early part of her career, which featured these close-up, almost zoomed-in views of various types of flowers. She became associated with flowers and all of their associations. O'Keeffe herself resisted these interpretations, and I think that's related to her turn, in this period of the mid-1930s, toward different subjects.

When she began to spend more time in New Mexico, she shifted her focus largely to the subject of the desert. And it really speaks to her conscious effort not to position herself as a woman artist but rather to buck the traditions and take on these subjects that were associated with the American West and cowboys and masculinity. Referring to the animal bones that O'Keeffe found in the desert, she said: "To me, they are as beautiful as anything I know; the bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert, even though it is vast and empty and untouchable."