Punk music icon, author and artist Patti Smith returned to downtown Sarasota's Marie Selby Botanical Gardens Wednesday night with a performance planned in part to honor another icon—painter Georgia O’Keeffe—whose birthday it was (Nov. 15). O’Keeffe plays a role in the gardens’ next Goldstein exhibition, Yayoi Kusama: A Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe, and Smith, who is artist in residence at Selby, displayed some of her connections to O’Keeffe as well in her concert.

Smith led off the evening with her song “Grateful,” saying that she was “grateful for the rain” that stopped shortly before she took the stage, “because I understand you really need it.” Her hair in braids, wearing a black jacket and accompanied by musician Tony Shanahan  (who also joined her in earlier performances at Selby in 2022, in conjunction with an exhibit featuring work by her late friend Robert Mapplethorpe, along with her poetry), Smith then talked about how as an artist she, like O’Keeffe, sometimes has worked through times of self-doubt, interspersing quotes from O’Keeffe’s own writings.

Smith touched on O’Keeffe’s “long, beautiful and complex relationship” with her husband, photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, before launching into a work by another artist, Charlotte Day Wilson, titled “Work.” Then she reminisced about a visit to the Metropolitan Museum she took with Mapplethorpe more than 50 years ago.

“I always loved Georgia O’Keeffe,” Smith said, “and when Robert started taking photographs we wanted to try me as a model,” the way O’Keeffe had been for Stieglitz. The pair’s friend, then curator of photography at the Met John McKendry, allowed them into the museum after closing to see some Stieglitz photos of Georgia that were not seen by the public, that Smith said “had a great effect on Robert, seeing the trust and intimacy between the photographer and his subject. Meanwhile, I was trying to copy what she did with her hands.”

Tied to O’Keeffe’s paintings of the desert after she moved to New Mexico, Smith led the audience into her song “Ghost Dance,” encouraging them to “shake out” the ghost dance in lyrics showing a Native American influence. Also on her playlist: a “Happy Birthday” salute to O’Keeffe, Smith’s late Abyssinian cat and belatedly for Selby Gardens CEO Jennifer Rominiecki; “Beneath the Southern Cross,” dedicated, as Smith said, “in remembrance of all lost children”; “Dancing Barefoot”; and Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush.”

“Around 1970 or 1971 [record producer] Bob Neuwirth wanted me to see this band at the Fillmore,” Smith said. “I wasn’t that interested, but he said, ‘No, they got a fourth guy now, and I think you’ll like him.’ Well, the guy was tall, lanky, wore a flannel shirt and had long stringy hair—just my type.” Smith added, “I did grow to be a fan of the other three guys [David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash] later, because my daughter Jesse was, and she taught her parent well.”

Smith’s crowd-pleaser “Because the Night,” her first hit, was performed as being both for Stieglitz and O’Keeffe and “for Selby Gardens” before Smith closed out the evening with a rendition (“a little world debut,” she said) of the Hoagy Carmichael standard “Georgia on My Mind” in honor of O’Keeffe. Struggling a bit with the lyrics, and the key, Smith eventually invited the audience to sing it, “cuz I’m f***ing it up.” Then she bid the crowd of 400 good night.

Smith will return to Selby in 2024. And the Yayoi Kusama: A Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition will open at Selby Feb. 11 to run through June 30. To stay up to date, visit selby.org.