Georgia O'Keeffe
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50 free Georgia O'Keeffe trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Georgia O'Keeffe painted flowers so large that busy New Yorkers had to stop and look, then swapped the skyscrapers of Manhattan for the bones, cliffs and wide skies of New Mexico. Over a career of some seventy years she became one of the most recognisable painters the United States has produced, and one of the most argued over. This quiz follows her whole story: a farm childhood, art school and years of teaching, the gallery owner who became her champion and husband, the close-up blooms and night-time cityscapes of the 1920s, and the high-desert homes where she worked into her nineties. There are questions on famous canvases, record sale prices, friends and visitors, and the films, honors and tributes that keep her name alive. It is written for art lovers, students and teachers looking for a ready-made quiz or classroom worksheet. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which white flower fills the Georgia O'Keeffe painting that sold for a record $44.4 million in 2014?
Jimson weed
Jimson weed, a toxic desert bloom she let flourish around her New Mexico patio, fills the 1932 canvas. Its sale more than tripled the auction record for a woman artist.
Q 02Which photographer and gallery owner exhibited Georgia O'Keeffe's drawings in 1916 and married her eight years later?
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz went on to make more than 300 portraits of her before he retired from photography in 1937. He was 23 years her senior.
Q 03In which New Mexico city did the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum open in 1997, eleven years after the painter's death?
Santa Fe
Santa Fe was her home for the last two years of her life. The museum there now also looks after her preserved house and studio, 53 miles to the north.
Q 04Which former dude resort in New Mexico became Georgia O'Keeffe's summer home and the subject of many paintings?
Ghost Ranch
Ghost Ranch took its name from local legends of evil spirits. Its red cliffs fill her landscapes, and one quarry there holds nearly a thousand Coelophysis dinosaur skeletons.
Q 05Which animal's skull hangs before stripes of red, white and blue in a famous 1931 Georgia O'Keeffe painting?
Cow
Cow skulls and other bones she gathered from the New Mexico desert became her signature subjects. The three colours stand for the American flag, and the canvas belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Q 06Which eye condition cost Georgia O'Keeffe much of her sight by 1972, ending her oil painting without assistance?
Macular degeneration
Macular degeneration left her with only peripheral vision. She kept on drawing in pencil until 1984, two years before her death at the age of 98.
Q 07Which fruit company's forerunner commissioned Georgia O'Keeffe to visit Hawaii in 1939 and paint for its advertisements?
Dole
Dole, then called the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, got 20 lush paintings from her nine weeks in the islands, though the pineapple it wanted came only after a plant was shipped to her New York studio.
Q 08Which studio smell did Georgia O'Keeffe say made her ill during four years when she gave up painting?
Turpentine
Turpentine turned her stomach after her father's bankruptcy ended her studies in 1908. She worked as a commercial artist in Chicago, then taught, until a 1912 summer class drew her back to art.
Q 09What kind of creature is Effigia okeeffeae, named in 2006 to honor Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico landscapes?
A fossil crocodile relative
A fossil crocodile relative that walked on two legs, it sat unopened in a museum's plaster jacket for almost 60 years after being dug up in 1947 near her summer home.
Q 10Which car did Georgia O'Keeffe buy and learn to drive in 1929, then use to explore the New Mexico desert?
Ford Model A
A Ford Model A carried the artist, known as a loner, across the land she loved. She bought it at 41, in the first summer she spent painting in New Mexico.
Q 11Georgia O'Keeffe spent decades rejecting critics' claims that her magnified flower paintings were really about what?
Female sexuality
Female sexuality was read into the flowers from the 1920s on. She answered that people who found erotic symbols in her pictures were really talking about their own affairs.
Q 12In which state was Georgia O'Keeffe running a college art department when she left for New York in 1918?
Texas
Texas gave her the wide Panhandle skies and the cliffs of Palo Duro Canyon, which she painted in vivid watercolours on her long walks.
Q 13In which Midwestern state was Georgia O'Keeffe born in 1887, the second of seven children in a farming family?
Wisconsin
Q 21Which animal lies beside a copper pot in the still life that won Georgia O'Keeffe a student prize in 1908?
Rabbit
Rabbit and pot earned her the William Merritt Chase still-life prize at the Art Students League, and with it a scholarship to an outdoor summer school.
Q 22Shortly before a breakdown put Georgia O'Keeffe in hospital, she lost a mural project for which New York venue?
Radio City Music Hall
Radio City Music Hall would have carried her mural, but the project was lost. She spent two months in hospital in 1933 and did not paint again until January 1934.
Q 23The gallery that first showed Georgia O'Keeffe in 1916 was called 291 after its address on which New York street?
Fifth Avenue
Wisconsin's Sun Prairie was her birthplace, and by the age of ten she had decided to become an artist. A middle school in Madison now carries her name.
Q 14In 1946 Georgia O'Keeffe became the first woman given a solo retrospective at which New York institution?
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art show came in the year her husband died. Three years later she left New York for good to live in New Mexico.
Q 15Juan Hamilton, hired by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1973 as her sight failed, taught her to work in which material?
Clay
Clay was Hamilton's own medium, since he was a potter. He also coaxed her back to painting and helped her write her bestselling 1976 autobiography.
Q 16Which painter befriended Georgia O'Keeffe in New York in 1931 and kept in touch during her 1933 hospital stay?
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo met her at the opening of Diego Rivera's New York exhibition, and kept in touch while her new friend recovered from a breakdown in hospital.
Q 17A pine tree Georgia O'Keeffe painted from below in 1929 stood at the New Mexico home of which English novelist?
D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence wrote at a table under the big ponderosa. She lay on his bench and looked up through the branches at the night sky, so the picture can be hung more than one way up.
Q 18Which traditional material forms the thick walls of Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico home, a National Historic Landmark?
Adobe
Adobe walls surround a central patio in the house, parts of which date to the 1700s. She added skylights to flood it with daylight, saying she wanted not a Spanish or an Indian house but her own.
Q 19Georgia O'Keeffe was named after her maternal grandfather, a count who emigrated to America in 1848 from which country?
Hungary
Hungary was the homeland of her mother's father, whose surname Totto became her middle name. Her father's side of the family was of Irish descent.
Q 20Georgia O'Keeffe, whose career spanned seven decades, is often called the "Mother" of which art movement?
American modernism
American modernism owes her some of its best-known images, yet her work stayed largely independent of the major art movements of her day.
Fifth Avenue's number 291 gave the gallery its name, though its room, only fifteen feet square, was actually next door at 293. It closed in 1917.
Q 24In which medium did Georgia O'Keeffe make the 1915 abstract drawings that a friend carried to a New York gallery?
Charcoal
Charcoal abstractions made while she was teaching in South Carolina so impressed the gallery's owner that he hung ten of them without asking her permission.
Q 25Which actress played the painter in the 2009 television film Georgia O'Keeffe, opposite Jeremy Irons as her husband?
Joan Allen
Joan Allen took painting lessons for the role, and the crew became the first film company allowed to shoot at the artist's own New Mexico home.
Q 26Which Judy Chicago artwork of 1979 honors Georgia O'Keeffe alongside 38 other women from history and myth?
The Dinner Party
The Dinner Party lays a triangular table with 39 place settings, and hers is among the final ones, standing for the twentieth century. It lives at the Brooklyn Museum.
Q 27Which garden flower was the subject of Georgia O'Keeffe's first large-scale flower painting, made in 1924?
Petunia
Petunia, No. 2 was first shown in 1925. She went on to make about 200 flower paintings, many of them enlarged as if seen through a magnifying lens.
Q 28Which illness forced Georgia O'Keeffe to take a year off after she ranked top of her class at art school?
Typhoid fever
Typhoid fever interrupted her studies in 1906. The next year she enrolled in New York instead, where one of her teachers was the painter William Merritt Chase.
Q 29What kind of farm did Georgia O'Keeffe's parents run when she was born in the American Midwest in 1887?
Dairy
Dairy farming was the family business until 1902, when the O'Keeffes moved south and her father started making concrete building blocks that never found a market.
Q 30Where in upstate New York did Georgia O'Keeffe spend summers at her husband's family estate and later bury his ashes?
Lake George
Lake George was the site of Oaklawn, his father's estate. Years earlier, as a student, she had won a scholarship to a summer school at the same lake.