When Wisconsin-born Georgia O’Keeffe accepted a position to teach drawing at a small women’s college in South Carolina’s capital city, her reputation in the art world could perhaps be considered aspiring, at best. Her pre-1915 portfolio consists of rough sketches from her drawing book, several scenes from the University of Virginia’s campus, a few stoic still lifes, and an assortment of portraiture studies. These preliminary pieces are a far cry from the bold, often abstract, and frequently Western-themed works of which she later enjoyed great acclaim.

Georgia’s correspondence with Anita Pollitzer — a classmate, pen pal, and lifelong friend — suggests she lamented leaving behind the inspiring atmosphere of New York for what she anticipated as a comparatively dull life on the campus of Columbia College, a venue about which she knew next to nothing. However, it soon became clear that a change of both pace and place was the proper prescription for her artistic appetite.

In just a matter of months at the college, the combination of a light teaching load and a geographically vast separation from the artistic powers-that-be of her day proved to be a conduit for creativity. She explored the landscape of the Midlands; befriended the family of James Ariail, the college’s president and a professor of English; and taught art lessons to the 11-year-old granddaughter of professor J.H. Earnshaw. She enjoyed drawing her bow along the taut strings of a violin, she read, and she doubled down on her commitment to create original, emotive art.

In doing these things, Georgia discovered that, in order to construct her artistic identity, she first had to deconstruct the identities of the artists she had studied and heretofore assumed as her own.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s inflection point materialized itself in a series of charcoal drawings she created in the fall of 1915, entitled “Special.” They were strikingly dissimilar from anything she — or anyone else, for that matter — had created up until this point. She employed grandiose curvature and demonstrated a keen ability to create dramatic depth using a simplistic charcoal palette. Having deemed this sample worthy of sharing with Anita, her confidante and fellow artist, she rolled up the drawings and shipped them to New York for further evaluation.

Anita’s response to the works cemented her friend’s intuition that at last she had produced art that was singularly identifiable as her own. Despite Georgia’s instruction to Anita that the pieces were for her eyes only, she good-naturedly presented them to Alfred Stieglitz at his vogue New York gallery, known to the art community simply as 291. The photographer and modern art aficionado was so impressed with what was laid out before him that, unbeknownst to the isolated artist, Alfred hung Georgia’s “Special” series in 1916.

This furtive gallery showing set Georgia’s artistic career alight. She spent the next seven decades spinning threads of artwork from the same wheel that she discovered within herself while teaching at Columbia College. Throughout her long career, she experimented with various mediums and subject matter, but all the while echoes of the stylistic approach she discerned in Columbia continued to manifest themselves in her art.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s time in Columbia remains a point of pride for the college. Martin Lang, assistant professor of studio art and program chair of the college’s studio art program, says of the artist’s legacy, “It’s certainly a very cool part of our history for the college and also for the studio art program.” The profundity of her brief yet indispensable time on campus is memorialized just outside the college’s Goodall Gallery in a garden named in her honor, which was dedicated during the 2015 centennial anniversary of the artist’s residence in Columbia.