Five Letters to Georgia O’Keeffe

Abstract

In her lifetime, US American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) wrote thousands of letters to those closest to her. However, she relied on painting as her primary public voice. This essay takes the form of five letters, composed through posthumanist performative writing,1 addressed to O’Keeffe. I work through the process of experiencing the death of my father in a material landscape as it was painted by O’Keeffe. The southwestern landscapes O’Keeffe painted were the same landscapes in which my father and I negotiated material relations to live a life of what Donna Haraway calls “significant otherness.”2