American artist Georgia O’Keeffe was BOTD in 1887. Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, she grew up on a dairy farm, and showed an early interest in drawing and painting. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, before moving to New York to attend the Art Students League. Uninterested in the prevailing traditions of imitative realism, she worked as a commercial artist and accepted a series of teaching positions, working on abstract paintings in her spare time. Her work attracted the attention of art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, who included her paintings in a 1916 exhibitions, sponsoring a solo show of her work in 1917 and offering to support her year-long painting sabbatical. She moved to New York in 1918 and began living with Stieglitz, eventually marrying in 1924 after he obtained a divorce. Stieglitz relentlessly promoted her work, marketing her work primarily in terms of her gender, despite her objections. In 1929, she began spending summers at a female art colony in New Mexico, before returning to New York to undertake a mural commission for Radio City Music Hall. The failure of her project and Stieglitz’s affair with a wealthy admirer contributed to her suffering a nervous breakdown in 1933, for which she was briefly hospitalised. After separating from Stieglitz, she relocated permanently to New Mexico in 1934, converting an abandoned hacienda into a home and studio. She continued her explorations of abstract paintings, producing landscapes and striking images of flowers and cows skulls. Seeking to cast off Stieglitz’s influence, she managed all aspects of her own career, presenting herself as an independent and genderless artist, controlling public access to her work and often purchasing her own paintings to keep their market resale value high. She abandoned oil paintings in her mid-70s due to poor eyesight, shifting into watercolours and clay sculpture, and publishing in autobiography in 1976. O’Keeffe had relationships with men and women throughout her life, including Rebecca Strand (also known as Beck), Mabel Dodge Luhan and (probably) her close friend Frida Kahlo. She retired to Sante Fe, dying in 1986, aged 98. Her companion in her final years was her 27 year-old assistant Juan Hamilton, to whom she left the bulk of her estate. Hailed as one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century, she became a heroine of the feminist movement, while her queer-themed work, notably her vaginal paintings of canna lilies, attracted a devoted lesbian following.