The name is absent

62

Both artists also seem to have spent their very productive careers working away
from the mainstream of American artists. Originally O’Keeffe’s plan was to become an
art teacher. She took classes at such prestigious schools as The School of the Art Institute
of Chicago, Art Students League of New York, University of Virginia, and Teachers
College of Columbia University. After teaching in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina,
her drawings came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz, an important promoter of modem
art and a well-known photographer. The two would eventually marry, and with Stieglitz’s
support and promotion in his gallery, O’Keeffe’s career as a painter was established.

Despite the fact that her husband was at the center of the New York art world, and
that her paintings soon became sought after and admired throughout America and
Europe, O’Keeffe would often spend months away from her husband and New York,
studying and painting images of nature. In a 1926 letter to novelist Jean Toomer, she
described looking down “the winding road that would end in the red rock country of
northern New Mexico and saw ‘aloneness—not because I wish it so but because there
seems no other way.’”²⁴ In New Mexico, O’Keeffe was described as “a woman apart,”²⁵
somewhat involved in the Chamber Music Festival, but otherwise not part of the social or
cultural scene around her.

Larsen is distinguished among her colleagues in that she is one of a small handful
of composers working in America today who is not affiliated with a college or university.
Her home in Minneapolis, situated in the Lake of the Isles neighborhood, is a block from
a series of lakes, and she takes advantage of the trails along the water to ran and train for
marathons. Although a major metropolitan area with two first-rate orchestras, the Twin
²⁴ Ibid., 112.

25

Ibid., 111.

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