Letters Like the Day : On Reading Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe mistrusted words. She claimed color as her language. Nevertheless, in the course of her long life, the great American painter wrote thousands of letters—more than two thousand survive between her and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, alone. Jennifer Sinor’s Letters Like the Day honors O’Keeffe, her modernist landscapes, and, crucially, the value of letter writing. In the painter’s correspondence, we find an intimacy with words that is all her own. Taking her letters as a touchstone, Sinor experiments with the limits of language using the same aesthetic that drove O’Keeffe’s art. Through magnification, cropping, and juxtaposition—hallmarks of modernism—Sinor explores the larger truths at the center of O’Keeffe’s work: how we see, capture, and create. Letters Like the Day pursues the highest function of art—to take one’s medium to the edge and then push beyond.