Waterfall – No. III – ‘Īao Valley by Georgia O’Keeffe

The subjects of Georgia O’Keeffe’s best-known works are magnified florals, high desert landscapes, and Southwestern bone paintings—scenes familiar to many. Less known are her tropical flowers, seascapes, and verdant mountain scenes painted during a nine-week trip to the Islands in 1939. HoMA is fortunate to own five out of twenty O’Keeffe Hawai‘i paintings, including two Maui landscapes that abstract the misty waterfalls of ‘Īao Valley into zipper-like tracts carving through vertiginous cliffs, as exemplified in the museum’s dramatic painting, Waterfall – No. III – ‘Īao Valley.

Commissioned to create two paintings to illustrate fruit juice ads for Hawai‘i Pineapple Company (currently Dole), O’Keeffe set out on an all-expenses paid trip. She submitted a (non-native) tropical floral painting and a landscape of a papaya tree on a hillside—also in the museum’s collection. By some accounts, Dole resorted to shipping a pineapple to O’Keeffe in New York, where she painted a dramatic view straight down its prickly stock, used in an ad in the Saturday Evening Post.

Was O’Keeffe’s original, pineapple-free submission an oversight by an excited traveler, an intentional snub, or a form of passive resistance against the racist and patriarchal cultures of Hawai‘i’s plantation system of the 1930s and ’40s? Agricultural businesses, which employed immigrant field workers from China, Japan, Korea, Portugal, and the Philippines, were then regularly cited for workers’ rights violations. When the fiercely independent and successful O’Keeffe requested a residence near the pineapple plantations to better capture the look and feel of the “sharp and silvery fields,” she was flatly denied and told it was improper for a woman to live among the laborers. Dole tried to appease O’Keeffe with a peeled, sliced pineapple, and she dismissed the situation as “manhandled.” 

While O’Keeffe’s modern, crisp style and abstract interpretations are rarely seen through analytical prisms of social protest, it’s arguable that her non-native blossoms and unpeopled landscapes of Hawai‘i may have had deeper social implications as private forms of protest against the economic, racial, and gender hierarchies of the day.

— Catherine Whitney, Director of Curatorial Affairs

Georgia O’Keeffe. American, 1887-1986
Waterfall – No. III – ‘Īao Valley, 1939
Oil on canvas
Gift of Susan Crawford Tracy, 1996 (8562.1)