'Through the Long Desert' explores the parallels and connections between Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright

They were immensely creative thinkers, independent doers and throughout their lives inspired by nature — colors, shapes, landscapes — in their art and designs.

They mostly had a long-distance friendship.

The earliest parallel Wright and O’Keeffe shared goes back to the 19th century in the southern part of Wisconsin.

Wright was born in 1867 close to Spring Green, Wisconsin, and years later designed his home/studio, Taliesin I, nearby.

In 1887, O’Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on a dairy farm about 60 miles away from Spring Green. They did not know each other in Wisconsin.

In another parallel, in the later chapters of their lives, they worked in neighboring states in the Southwest — O’Keeffe at her home/studios at Ghost Ranch and at Abiquiú in northern New Mexico, Wright at Taliesin West, what he called his “desert laboratory” near Chandler, Arizona.

Both were drawn to and inspired by the vastness and the colors of the desert landscape.

“Along the way,” Wanda M. Corn writes in the book’s introduction, “the two navigated the same three cities — Chicago, New York and Tokyo.”

O’Keeffe and Wright were in Chicago and New York by necessity, “for the schooling, mentoring, galleries, commissions, colleagues and the press,” writes Corn, professor emerita of art at Stanford.

Rovang said in a phone interview she’s 90% certain that O’Keeffe and Wright met in New York at some point.

Rovang writes that Wright attended O’Keeffe’s major career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946. The book says Wright wrote to O’Keeffe that he noticed the painting she had given him — “Pelvis with Shadows and the Moon” — was not in the exhibit.

The author writes that neither O’Keeffe nor Wright considered Europe for artistic inspiration, as many American artists were drawn in the first half of the 20th century.

Indeed, Rovang writes, O’Keeffe and Wright found spiritual nourishment in Japan.

The book’s foreword, written by Stuart Graff and Cody Hartley, explained that the idea for the book grew from their preparation, in 2017, for the next day’s panel discussion on the conservation and presentation of historic studios. The discussion was going to be at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.

(Graff is former president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Hartley is director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.)

Graff and Hartley were chatting at O’Keeffe’s home/studio in Abiquiú about the Wrightian elements of O’Keeffe’s home and furniture. That led to the question: Did O’Keeffe and Wright know each other? Graff and Hartley didn’t have an answer.

The next day’s panel discussion prompted audience members to ask similar questions. Were the artist and the architect friends? Did they work together?

Graff and Hartley wrote in the Foreword they did learn that O’Keeffe and Wright had “a professional admiration and a personal friendship,” though their relationship wasn’t well documented nor explored in scholarship.

Enter Rovang. She was among those in the audience asking questions of the panelists.

Later, Rovang recalled, she approached Graff and Hartley and, as she put it, “I somewhat volunteered” to write a scholarly book about O’Keeffe and Wright.

Her offer was accepted. The result is “Through the Long Desert,” her first book.

Rovang’s book noted that the artist and the architect exchanged several dozen letters between 1933 and 1947 and in one Wright invited O’Keeffe to join a new enterprise — an annual fellowship for an architectural apprentice.

Rovang quotes a letter Wright wrote to O’Keeffe in the 1930s as saying that the apprentices would be attracted to the fellowships if a permanent artist or intellectual was at its head. O’Keeffe declined that invitation.

The book also told of a visit O’Keeffe made to Wright at Taliesin in 1942; it was part of a trip she took to accept an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin.

Rovang writes that O’Keeffe spent hours in conversation with Wright, telling her friend Maria Chabot in a letter, “It was worth doing it all for the hours with Wright — I’d go a long way for that. … He is one of our great ones.”

Rovang also writes that O’Keeffe visited Taliesin West in 1949. It was the same year she permanently relocated to New Mexico.

Rovang holds a doctorate in the history of art and architecture at Brown University and is a historian of American Modernism and landscapes.

The book may be for scholars but Rovang said in the phone interview that she believes it will also appeal to the general reader: “I hope there is something for everyone.”

She added, “The academic part of me dies hard. I’m no longer in that world. But people still in the field of architectural history will want to pick the book up,” Rovang said.

O’Keeffe and Wright both have a strong fan base, Rovang noted. “To put those communities in contact with each other and with the existing enthusiasm for them has made doing this project exhilarating,” she said.

Born and raised in Albuquerque, Rovang graduated from La Cueva High School. She lives in Santa Fe where she is a program evaluator for the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee.

'Through the Long Desert' explores the parallels and connections between Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright