Georgia O’Keeffe’s Hawai‘i?

In 1939 Georgia O’Keeffe traveled to the Territory of Hawai‘i to fulfill a commission for the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son. Her expenses were covered in exchange for two paintings to be used in advertisements for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole Food Company), an enterprise entangled with the conquest of Hawai‘i. James Dole built his pineapple empire on the dispossession and oppression of Indigenous Hawaiians by U.S. missionaries, businessmen, and politicians. O’Keeffe’s experiences in and paintings of Hawai‘i were structured by colonialism, and Dole advertisements that feature her paintings served to justify and naturalize U.S. conquest. To understand O’Keeffe’s work as participating in the highly racialized project of colonialism is to disrupt dominant histories that, often unwittingly, contribute to the ongoing disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples. Doing so is an important step toward “decolonizing” the history of American modernism.