Sascha Scott Colloquium

"O’Keeffe’s Hawai‘i?: Decolonizing the History of American Modernism"

This talk centers on paintings and advertisements created by Georgia O’Keeffe in 1939, when she was in Hawai‘i working for the Hawaiian Food Company (now the Dole Food Company). I will explore the ways in which O’Keeffe’s seemingly apolitical paintings participate in the highly racialized project of colonialism, as well as how contemporary scholarship about O’Keeffe unwittingly contributes to the ongoing disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples.