The Detroit Institute of Arts is presenting Georgia O'Keeffe: Architecture, an exhibition of nearly 40 works that highlights a lesser-known dimension of the artist, who is best known for her flowing depictions of flowers, bones and landscapes. Curator Ben Coleman built the show around O'Keeffe's precise, geometric studies of buildings, from rural barns and stables to New York skyscrapers, arguing that these works reveal how she used architecture to capture the character of a place, a skill she later brought to her famous paintings of New Mexico's adobe structures.

The show was inspired by O'Keeffe's 1932 painting Stables, the only work in the exhibition drawn from the Dia's own collection, which led Coleman to seek out other architectural pieces by the artist. These include cityscapes painted from the window of her Manhattan apartment at the Shelton Hotel, where she and husband Alfred Stieglitz lived on progressively higher floors from 1926, as well as gritty industrial scenes of the East River and a striking 1949 depiction of the Brooklyn Bridge, made as she prepared to leave New York for New Mexico permanently.