Annie Leibovitz Kicks Off PILGRIMAGE Exhibition at Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Today

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum announces its first exhibition of 2013, entitled Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage opens today, February 15, 2013. After a talk at the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Pilgrimage last night, Annie Leibovitz introduced the new show in a press preview today. The exhibition officially opens to the public today, February 15, 2013.

The show charts a new direction for one of America's best-known living photographers. Unlike her staged and carefully lit portraits made on assignment for magazines and advertising clients, the photographs in this exhibition were taken simply because Leibovitz was moved by the subject.

The pictures, while not containing people, are in a certain sense portraits of subjects that have shaped Leibovitz's distinctly American view of her cultural inheritance. Visiting the homes of iconic figures, including O'Keeffe, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pete Seeger and Elvis Presley, as well as places such as Niagara Falls, Walden Pond, Old Faithful and the Yosemite Valley, she let her instincts and intuitions guide her to related subjects-hence the title "Pilgrimage." The images speak in a commonplace language to the photographer's curiosity about the world she inherited, spanning landscapes both dramatic and quiet, interiors of living rooms and bedrooms, and objects that are talismans of past lives.

The exhibition, which includes about 70 photographs taken between April 2009 and May 2011, is making a national tour to 8 museums (a full list and dates can be found here), which started in January 2012 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

"Annie Leibovitz's Pilgrimage is much like Georgia O'Keeffe's work in that it captures a place in time with such evocative power and emotion that you cannot help but feel the connection, the deep sense of place," said Rob Kret, director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. "We are honored to have her work here and feel that it truly commemorates and complements the ongoing 'Georgia O'Keeffe and the Faraway: Nature and Image' exhibition with paintings and photographs of O'Keeffe's most beloved and inspiring locations in the Southwest."

"From the beginning, when I was watching my children stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls, this project was an exercise in renewal," said Leibovitz. "It taught me to see again."

Pilgrimage is an evocative and deeply personal statement by a photographer whose career now spans more than 40 years, encompassing a broad range of subject matter, history and stylistic influences. Together the pictures show Leibovitz at the height of her powers, unfettered by the demands of her career and pondering how photographs, including her own, shape a narrative of history that informs the present.

THE BOOK: The accompanying book, published by Random House, includes an introduction by noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Pilgrimage is available for purchase ($50) at bookstores nationwide and the museum's store.

Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage was organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Bernie Stadiem Endowment Fund provided support for the exhibition. The C.F. Foundation in Atlanta supports the museum's traveling exhibition program, Treasures to Go.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum is dedicated to the artistic legacy of Georgia O'Keeffe, to defining its ongoing significance, and to the study and interpretation of American Modernism, late 19th century to the present. Located in Santa Fe, NM, the Museum's collections, exhibits, research center, publications and education programs contribute to scholarly discourse and serve diverse audiences. The largest single repository of the artist's work in the world, it is the only museum in the world dedicated to an internationally known American woman artist and is the most visited art museum in New Mexico. For more information, visit www.okeeffemuseum.org.