American artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) created a series of sketches, paintings and photographs based on her more than nine-week visit to four of the Hawaiian Islands in the Territory of Hawaii in the summer of 1939.

Her trip was part of an all-expenses-paid commercial art commission from the Philadelphia advertising firm N. W. Ayer & Son on behalf of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, later known as Dole.

Two of the paintings from this commission, Crab's Claw Ginger Hawaii and Pineapple Bud, were used in advertisements that appeared in popular American magazines in 1940.

The original exhibition led to the sale of one work, Cup of Silver Ginger, which contemporaneously entered the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art.

O'Keeffe studied art at a Catholic girls' high school, where she first focused on larger images in her paintings in response to a nun who criticized a drawing of two hands she had made as tiny and out of proportion.

She won a scholarship in 1908, but financial problems caused O'Keeffe to leave art school and move to Chicago in late 1908, where she worked as a commercial artist.

Noticing O'Keeffe was no longer painting, her sister Anita invited her to take classes from Alon Bement who was training students to teach art to children.

[11] By the late 1930s, O'Keeffe was highly productive and sought after, and her profile as an artist had reached a crescendo with multiple exhibitions and mixed, yet positive reviews.

Months later, Elizabeth Arden, then one of the wealthiest women in the world, commissioned O'Keeffe to paint Jimson Weed (1936) for her Gymnasium Moderne, a New York salon and fitness center.

In May of that same year, she received an honorary doctorate from the College of William & Mary, which was arranged by Earl B. Thomas, an old friend of O'Keeffe's who was now working for Philadelphia advertising firm N. W. Ayer & Son as an executive.

[γ] Coiner hired modern artists to persuade customers of the quality of purchasing products made by Ayer's clients in high-end magazine advertisements.

In the summer of 1938, O'Keeffe was offered an all-expenses paid, nine-week trip to the territory of Hawaii as a commercial art commission for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company.

"O'Keeffe insisted on staying in the village where the pineapple workers lived, to avoid making the long round-trip drive there every day", writes art historian Michele H. Bogart.

[34] O'Keeffe left Hawaii on April 14, 1939, traveling on the ocean liner SS Matsonia back to San Francisco, after which she took a train to New York.

Sometime between June and July, O'Keeffe eventually completed her commission, producing Crab's Claw Ginger Hawaii and Pineapple Bud for Dole to use in their advertisements.

[44] Crab's Claw Ginger Hawaii shows an image of a red heliconia in close view with the ocean in the background along the bottom; an island can be seen along the horizon with low-lying clouds.

[47] It is not entirely clear which paintings were completed in Hawaii and which were finished on the mainland in New York, but O'Keeffe acknowledged this distinction in her original 1940 exhibition statement.

[η] Previously, art historians like Lisa Messinger have dismissed O'Keeffe's Hawaii paintings as "very beautiful", but of "secondary importance" because they were perceived as formulaic and lacking innovation.

[51] Art historians believe that the flowers depicted in Bella Donna with Pink Torch Ginger Bud and White Lotus were already familiar to O'Keeffe before she visited Hawaii, indicating that she was staying within her comfort zone, painting what she knew at first.

The intensity of her focus on these new tropical flowers increased over her stay, turning her attention to the large "waxy" redness of the Heliconia, the exotic, contrasting colors of the Pink Ornamental Banana, and yet, also revisiting her past success and familiar style with works like Cup of Silver Ginger.

Saville traced it to the collection of Alice and Fred Rubin, noting in her catalog that it shared qualities with O'Keeffe's work depicting flowers at close range in the 1920s, but was unable to borrow it for the 1990 exhibition.

Papanikolas was unable to find the painting in time for the 2018 exhibition, but just days after it opened in New York City, Hibiscus appeared at auction, where it sold for US$4.8 million.

[61] The waterfalls were made possible by a period of heavy rain, requiring O'Keeffe to paint inside a car for cover in the backseat with Jennings watching.

[63] In the waterfall series, O'Keeffe returned to the bisected V motif found in earlier works like Inside Red Canna (1919), Flower Abstraction (1924), and Small Purple Hills (1934).

[65] Art critic Henry McBride and curator Jennifer Saville both argue that O'Keeffe treated the fishooks series in the same way as she did the works symbolizing the Southwest, attempting to also get to the heart of Hawaii with her paintings.

O'Keeffe borrowed Stein's camera to produce an additional 17[θ] photographs of Maui, including flowers (Fence Morning Glory), landscapes (Sugar Cane Fields and Clouds), and cultural artifacts (Canoe Shed at Wai'anapanapa Black Sand Beach).

[74] One notable technique O'Keeffe brought to photography was the experimental method of "reframing", changing the position of the camera in each shot to arrange the elements in a unique way, resulting in different compositions of the same scene.

It is believed that O'Keeffe came to this method through the instructional techniques of her teacher Arthur Wesley Dow, as it notably shows up in her Hawaii series, such as Lava Arch, Wai'anapanapa State Park and Natural Stone Arch near Leho‘ula Beach, ‘Aleamai, but also in her paintings more than a decade earlier (Shell and Old Shingle, 1926) as well as in photos almost two decades later (Garage Vigas and Studio Door, 1956; Road, 1957; White House Overlook, 1957).

[83] In 2018, Papanikolas also curated a showing of 17 of the 20 works in the Hawaii series at the Georgia O'Keeffe: Visions of Hawaiʻi exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, along with a horticultural exhibition of Hawaiian plants and flowers from the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, combined with cultural programs and performances from May 19 through October 28, after which it traveled to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art from December 1 through February 24, 2019.

[86] The plants and flowers O'Keeffe painted represent introduced species that had been brought to the Hawaiian Islands over a period of 1500 years, initially by Polynesian voyagers in canoes, and much later, Europeans.