Dear Friends,

Welcome to our fall season at the MFA, as we open “Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore” in the Museum’s Gund Gallery. The exhibition, the first to bring work by O’Keeffe and Moore together, was organized by the San Diego Museum of Art, and represents an unprecedented collaboration with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Henry Moore Foundation. Both artists have long been esteemed for their distillation of natural forms into abstraction—O’Keeffe’s iconic paintings of flowers, shells, bones, and surrounding landscapes, and Moore’s monumental sculpted figures refining the human body’s curves and shapes into essential contours and apertures.

Moore wrote, “There is in nature a limitless variety of shapes and rhythms.” With almost 60 works by O’Keeffe and 90 by Moore, this is a memorable opportunity to enjoy the interplay of color, shapes, and rhythms of work by these great artists. I have been struck by how two artists, working in cherished rural spaces, at the same time and thousands of miles apart—O’Keeffe in New Mexico and Moore in England—found in the land and its “limitless variety of shapes and rhythms” a sustaining source of artistic inspiration. Erica Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings, explains, “O’Keeffe hoped that her paintings would make people pay attention to things they usually overlooked—the soft gradations of a flower petal, the patterns within a landscape, or the shapes between two objects. As O’Keeffe said herself, ‘to see takes time.’”

The exhibition gives you an opportunity “to see” O’Keeffe and Moore together and apart, learning to read their visual languages and contemplate their works in conversation, exploring how their ways of seeing and making art (the exhibition recreates the studio spaces of each artist) complement one another. It’s an experience to be within and to put your arms around; allow yourself plenty of time to enjoy and explore.

“Power of the People: Art and Democracy” opens on October 25 in the Foster and Rabb galleries in the Linde Family Wing. With 175 artworks, from ancient Greek to contemporary voices, drawn almost entirely from the MFA’s collection, the show examines symbols of freedom, democracy, and liberty through the eyes of artists. As a gathering place to engage with past democracies and our own rights and responsibilities of citizenship in this moment, we will encourage civic engagement by serving as an early voting polling place on October 26 and 27, as well as offering voter registration at community events this fall and related programs for teachers, students, and the public.

Matthew Teitelbaum
Ann and Graham Gund Director

Select Past Director’s Messages

• Letter from Boston Museum Directors in Support of the NEA
• MFA Director on Black Lives Matter