Born twenty years and sixty miles apart in southwest Wisconsin, Frank Lloyd Wright and Georgia O’Keeffe absorbed the late-nineteenth-century Midwest—its farms, barns, light, and horizons—before each forged a mature language in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. In this image-rich talk, Sarah Rovang traces how these shared geographies shaped two icons across a lifetime of work, from the red barns of Wisconsin to Taliesin West and O’Keeffe’s Abiquiú/Ghost Ranch homes. Blending new research and never-before-presented material, Rovang shows how Wright and O’Keeffe translated landscape into form—what they carried forward, what they shed, and how their friendship threads through it all. Book signing to follow: Through the Long Desert: Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright (Rizzoli Electa, 2025).
Sarah Rovang is an architectural historian and writer whose forthcoming Rizzoli book, Through the Long Desert, traces the intertwined journeys of Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright across the American landscape. She holds a PhD in the history of art and architecture from Brown University and previously taught at the University of Michigan. A recipient of the Society of Architectural Historians’ H. Allen Brooks Traveling Fellowship, she has researched industrial and cultural sites across five continents. Rovang served as a Research Fellow at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and her public-facing work has appeared in venues such as Hyperallergic and Panorama. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and works as a Program Evaluator at the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee. Instagram: @sarahmoderne.
Learning Objectives:
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
Identify specific Midwestern landscape features (e.g., agricultural forms, barns, horizon lines) that informed Wright’s and O’Keeffe’s early vocabularies and trace how those ideas evolved in later work.
Compare the role of place at Taliesin West and at O’Keeffe’s Abiquiú/Ghost Ranch homes to understand how “desert laboratories” shaped late spatial experimentation.
Describe the shared formal device of “vessel and void” across Wright’s late projects and O’Keeffe’s pelvis, patio-door, and ceramic explorations.
Discuss how cross-disciplinary exchange and friendship complicate the “isolated genius” myth and reframe American modernism as grounded in site and networked influence.