If you thought you knew the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) has a surprise in store. NYBG’s major 2018 exhibition is Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of Hawai‘i, focusing on the legendary artist’s little-known travels in the Hawaiian Islands in 1939.

Running from May 19 to October 28, 2018, the exhibition will feature a lush flower show in NYBG’s Enid A. Haupt Conservatory that evokes the gardens and landscapes that inspired O’Keeffe as well as the complex story of the flora and unique ecology of Hawai‘i. For visitors to NYBG, this promises to be a chance to travel to the Hawaiian Islands and view them as O’Keeffe saw them more than 70 years ago. Designed by Tony Award-winning set designer Scott Pask, the exhibition will also introduce visitors to the profound importance of plants in Hawaiian culture and growing concerns about threats to native Hawaiian plants.

The exhibition continues in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library Art Gallery at NYBG, which will offer a rare opportunity to see a group of 15 of O’Keeffe’s paintings that were created during a three-month sojourn commissioned by the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole) in 1939. Currently in private and museum collections, they were last seen together in New York in 1940 at Alfred Stieglitz’s An American Place gallery. The exhibit is curated by art historian Theresa Papanikolas, Ph.D., of the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Go to NYBG for more info.