In 2014, one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings sold for $44 million, one of the highest prices for a work by a female artist. Columbia College has been celebrating the centennial of O’Keeffe’s time on its campus as a teacher. On September 22, 1915, at the age of 27, Georgia O’Keeffe arrived in Columbia, South Carolina to begin a position teaching art at Columbia College. Still unknown to the art world then, O’Keeffe had realized her ability and passion to be an artist, and moving to South Carolina gave allowed O’Keeffe to be independent and self-supporting, and the position at Columbia College offered good pay with minimal teaching responsibilities. For O’Keeffe this time provided a means to focus on her own creative development.
During her time at Columbia College O’Keeffe developed her own ideas and responses towards art, nature, and music through a series of charcoal drawings. The process involved intense creative periods that resulted in new, abstracted imagery unlike any work the artist had created before. Not fully comprehending the validity of these new works, O’Keeffe mailed her drawings to friend, Anita Pollitzer in New York City, who in turn took the drawings to famed American photographer and maverick New York gallery owner, Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglez was very impressed with her work. Without O’Keeffe’s knowledge, Stieglitz exhibited the drawings in his gallery, 291, where the works were positively received by the New York public and became a major turning point in the artist’s life.
More information about this famous Columbia College faculty is located at http://www.ideasofmyown.com/her-story/.

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