Chatham Rotary members were treated to an informative program titled Georgia O’Keeffe Revisited presented by Rotarian Bill Black. Bill is a long-time Chatham Rotarian and has worked at Chatham Hall since 1982 in positions including Academic Dean, English Department Chair, and more recently as the School Historian and Archivist.
Georgia O’Keefe, a world famed artist, had her early formal academic training from 1903-1905 as a student at Chatham Episcopal Institute, a girls boarding and day school, now known as Chatham Hall. Two recent art exhibits and a major published study have led to a reevaluation of the influence Chatham Episcopal Institute exerted on the art of Georgia O’Keeffe and Ida O’Keeffe, Georgia’s sister who also attended during the same time period.
Bill’s presentation included wonderful slides of some of Georgia’s famous artwork and was enhanced by slides showing life at Chatham Episcopal Institute in the early 1900’s and stories from the archives of Chatham Hall telling what residential school life was like for Ms. O’Keeffe and her school friends. Slides included various pictures of the campus at the time, students involved in their campus routine, and the Art Studio where Georgia studied. Other pictures include drawings and paintings by Georgia and showed Georgia and her teammates in tennis and basketball. Excerpts from the school catalogs told of the daily routine for the girls including being up and dressed by seven a.m. and in bed by ten p.m. each night. Her course of study, know as the Literary Course of Study, was extremely demanding and included extensive study of Latin, science, math, and English as well as the Arts and was designed to prepare students for further study at the most prestigious colleges of the time. Unfortunately, most of the art work completed by Georgia was destroyed on her departure from Chatham Hall and the ensuing fire in 1906 that destroyed the Art Studio. Only one of her school paintings survives and it is still on display at Chatham Hall.
