Through the Long Desert: Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright | Hardcover

Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright never worked together. Apparently, they didn’t have to.

Artist Georgia O’Keeffe and architect Frank Lloyd Wright spent much of the twentieth century becoming two distinctly different versions of the American creative icon. But look at their lives side by side and the parallels start accumulating:  both were born in rural Wisconsin, built careers in Chicago and New York, looked to Japan for inspiration, and eventually found something essential in the vastness of the American Southwest.

In Through the Long Desert, architectural historian Sarah Rovang follows those connections through their art, architecture, landscapes, lives, and an intermittent friendship documented in roughly two dozen letters beginning in 1933. Across 320 richly illustrated pages, paintings, buildings, photographs, correspondence, and biographical details reveal two people thinking about many of the same things from entirely different directions:  nature, abstraction, independence, place, and what it means to make somewhere feel like home.

The desert becomes the common ground. For O’Keeffe, it was something to paint. For Wright, something to build within. Turns out there’s more than one way to spend a lifetime figuring out what to do with all that space.

The Details

• Hardcover
• Written by Sarah Rovang
• Explores the connections between Georgia O’Keeffe + Frank Lloyd Wright
• Features their art, architecture, correspondence + shared influences
• Examines their relationship with the American Southwest
• Richly illustrated throughout
• 320 pages
• Approx. 10.79" × 9.92"
• Published September 9, 2025

About the Author:  Sarah Rovang

Sarah Rovang studies buildings, which inevitably means studying the people who decided they should exist. An architectural historian, writer, and curator based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Rovang explores the relationships between architecture, landscape, culture, and the people responsible for shaping them. In Through the Long Desert, she brings that perspective to two figures we tend to encounter separately, using their correspondence, biographies, creative work, and shared fascination with place to reveal connections that have largely remained out of view.