SANTA FE, NM.- Barbara Buhler Lynes, widely recognized as the world’s leading authority on the life and art of Georgia O’Keeffe, resigned today after more than a decade as curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Emily Fisher Landau director of the Museum’s Research Center.

A pre-eminent O’Keeffe scholar, Dr. Lynes has been the driving force behind numerous exhibitions and helped to establish the international reputation for scholarship on O’Keeffe and on American Modernism. Dr. Lynes became the Museum’s first curator in 1999, two years after the Museum opened and shortly after the publication of the prize-winning Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, published by Yale University Press, a project of the National Gallery of Art and the now dissolved Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. The two-volume publication documents and authenticates O’Keeffe’s extensive body of work.

When the Museum opened its research center on American Modernism in 2001 – the first and only such center of its kind – she became its first director. During her 13 1/2-year tenure at the Museum, Dr. Lynes has curated or overseen more than 30 exhibitions of works by O’Keeffe and her contemporaries. These exhibitions include the first major traveling retrospective in Europe of O’Keeffe’s art, which opened last October in Rome, was on view in Munich for three months early this year, and opens in Helsinki in June.

She has also organized several symposia for the Research Center (on-line and in Santa Fe) on American Modernism that have attracted scholars from around the country. She established and has overseen the research center’s competitive scholarship program that brings up to six scholars to Santa Fe each year to spend up to three-to-twelve months as research fellows. In addition, during her tenure, she has authored numerous scholarly books and essays for exhibition catalogues, and has delivered frequent lectures on Georgia O’Keeffe and the world in which she painted.

“Barbara Lynes has made enormous contributions to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and to the art community at large during her years in Santa Fe,” said Anne Marion, founder and chairman of the board of the Museum. “The qualities of her scholarship and her innovative approach to research have enhanced the reputation of the O’Keeffe Museum throughout the country and around the world.”

“I have greatly enjoyed my affiliation with the Museum and leave with deep admiration for its director, board of directors, staff, and wonderful collections and with all best wishes for its future,” Lynes said. “Serving the museum has been an illuminating experience, and I look forward to pursuing new projects and opportunities.”

Before moving to Santa Fe, Dr. Lynes was Professor of Art History at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Montgomery College, Dartmouth College, and Vanderbilt University. Among other publications, she wrote “O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929,” published by the University of Chicago Press in 1989.