Celebrating the grand opening of Hauser & Wirth Palo Alto and its inaugural exhibition, ‘Calder | O’Keeffe,’ please join us during our first day-long program of talks, readings, performances, books, music and food, for an exhibition walkthrough with Georgia O’Keeffe Director of Curatorial Affairs Dr. Laura Wertheim Joseph and distinguished scholar and professor of American culture at Stanford University, Alexander Nemerov to discuss the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and her exceptional works on view.

Developed in close collaboration with the Calder Foundation, ‘Calder | O’Keeffe’ brings together works by Alexander Calder and Georgia O’Keeffe, complemented by archival materials documenting their decades-long friendship.

Georgia O’Keeffe once remarked that she recognized her own ‘pelvis bone holes’ in Calder’s forms—a striking moment of artistic recognition that speaks to the unexpected links between their practices. By offering a fresh perspective on Calder and O’Keeffe’s little-known friendship, this exhibition takes its place alongside a series of presentations we've organized over the past 35 years, aimed at revealing new and previously unexplored pathways in the language of modernism and modern culture.

Following the walkthrough, join us for the Grand Opening on Emerson Street – a block party featuring live music by Stanford Taiko and Cardinal Calypso, DJ sets by GULU, Tie Dye Trippin and bella d. and food trucks by Rincon Del Cielo Taqueria, Bay Area Munchiez and Crazy Empanadas. Enjoy complimentary Salt & Straw ice cream and Fez Coffee under shaded communal tables after exploring the first-of-its-kind exhibition.

This event is free, however, reservations are recommended. Click here to register.

About Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most significant artists of the 20th century, renowned for her contribution to modern art. Born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, O’Keeffe grew up on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O’Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, where she learned the techniques of traditional painting. By the mid-1920s, O’Keeffe was recognized as one of America’s most important and successful artists, known for her paintings of New York skyscrapers—an essentially American symbol of modernity—as well as her equally radical depictions of flowers.

In the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe made the first of many trips to northern New Mexico. The stark landscape and Native American and Hispanic cultures of the region inspired a new direction in O’Keeffe’s art. For the next two decades she spent most summers living and working in New Mexico. She made the state her permanent home in 1949. Georgia O’Keeffe died in Santa Fe on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98.

About Dr. Laura Wertheim Joseph 
Dr. Laura Wertheim Joseph is Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, where she provides strategic leadership for the Museum's collections, exhibitions, and research initiatives. She specializes in modern and contemporary art with a focus on embodiment, affect, and materiality, as well as intersectional feminisms and gender and performance studies. Through her work, she seeks to celebrate underrecognized creative practices and less common perspectives on cultural production. Many of her curatorial and scholarly projects have been dedicated to underrecognized women artists, including A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde (The Block Museum of Art), Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta (University of California Press), and Harriet Bart: Abracadabra and Other Forms of Protection (Weisman Art Museum).

About Alexander Nemerov 
Alexander Nemerov is the author of ‘Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York’, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography for 2021; as well as ‘The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s’, described by the novelist as “one of the richest books ever to come my way—deeply beautiful, achingly painful and astonishingly tender.” Now writing a memoir, Nemerov is a professor of art history at Stanford University.