By Coral Gables Gazette staff

A painter of flowers, bones, and desert horizons, Georgia O’Keeffe built a body of work that reshaped American art. A new documentary screening at the Coral Gables Art Cinema turns to the life behind those images — and the forces that shaped how the world came to see her.

Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light, presented as part of Women’s History Month, examines the career of the artist widely regarded as the central figure of American modernism. The film arrives in Coral Gables, Friday-Sunday, at 2 pm as both biography and reappraisal, tracing O’Keeffe’s rise, her relationships, and the cultural narratives that followed her work for decades.

An artist who defined her own terms

O’Keeffe emerged in New York in the 1920s with paintings that resisted easy classification. Her close-up depictions of flowers, her stark renderings of bones, and her studies of natural forms introduced a visual language that felt both intimate and monumental. The work drew attention immediately and established her as a defining voice in American art.

At the same time, her public image developed along a parallel track. Photographer Alfred Stieglitz — her partner and later husband — produced a series of nude portraits that shaped how audiences interpreted her paintings. That framing followed her work for years, often reducing complex compositions to a single lens of interpretation.

The documentary returns to that tension. It presents O’Keeffe not as a subject of interpretation, but as an artist who controlled her trajectory, even as others attempted to define it.

From New York to the New Mexico desert

The film follows O’Keeffe’s move away from New York to New Mexico, where she found a landscape that would become central to her work. The desert offered space, isolation, and a different scale of observation — elements that defined her later paintings.

By the 1970s, that same independence positioned her as a cultural figure beyond the art world. O’Keeffe became a reference point for a generation of women seeking models of creative and personal autonomy. The documentary situates that shift within a broader cultural moment, linking her work to the evolving conversation around identity and authorship.

A cinematic portrait

Directed by Academy Award–winning filmmaker Paul Wagner, The Brightness of Light combines archival material, narration, and music to construct its portrait. Actor Hugh Dancy serves as narrator, with Claire Danes voicing O’Keeffe, bringing the artist’s words into the present.

The film’s structure reflects its subject. It moves between public history and private perspective, between the work itself and the interpretations that followed it. The result is a study of both an artist and the narratives that shaped her legacy.

A Women’s History Month screening

The Coral Gables Art Cinema’s presentation places the film within a broader recognition of women who have shaped cultural history. O’Keeffe’s career offers a case study in persistence and authorship — an artist establishing a place within a field that did not initially make room for her.

The screening invites viewers to look again at work that has become familiar and to reconsider the context in which it was created. It also offers something more immediate: the experience of seeing a life in art unfold on screen, framed not by reputation but by intention.