| Hawaii series | |
|---|---|
 Hibiscus with Plumeria (1939, Smithsonian American Art Museum). | |
| Housed at | Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Honolulu Museum of Art Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Smithsonian American Art Museum Baltimore Museum of Art Muscatine Art Center Private collection |
| Size (no. of items) | 20 paintings, 17+ photographs |
American artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) created a series of 20 paintings and 17 photographs based on her more than nine-week visit to four of the Hawaiian Islands in the Territory of Hawaii in the summer of 1939. Her trip was part of an all-expenses paid commercial art commission from the Philadelphia advertising firm N. W. Ayer & Son on behalf of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, later known as Dole. The company arranged for O'Keeffe to paint two works, without any artistic restrictions, for a magazine advertising campaign for pineapple juice. Two of the paintings from this commission, Crab's Claw Ginger Hawaii and Pineapple Bud, were used in advertisements that appeared in popular American magazines in 1940. Her photos of Hawaii, all from the island of Maui, are said to be her first major works in that medium up to that point.
The exhibition of O'Keeffe's complete Hawaii series of paintings, comprising tropical flowers, landscapes, and cultural artifacts, has only been shown together in their entirety once, appearing in O'Keeffe's original showing at An American Place from February 1 to March 17, 1940, which was positively received by critics at the time. The original exhibition led to the sale of one work, Cup of Silver Ginger, which contemporaneously entered the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Subsequent public exhibitions in 1990, 2013, and 2018, have shown only part of the series due to six of the paintings in the series being held in disparate public and private collections. In 2021, O'Keeffe's Hawaii photos from the series were first shown in a traveling exhibition dedicated solely to her photography.