O’Keeffe letters to be added to WT’s Cornette Library permanent collection

CANYON — Unpublished letters of iconic artist Georgia O’Keeffe officially will be added to the permanent collection of West Texas A&M University’s Cornette Library during an event to be held on O’Keeffe’s 136th birthday.

Dr. Amy Von Lintel, WT professor of art history and director of gender studies, will speak during a Friends of the Cornette Library event at 6 p.m. Nov. 15.

Von Lintel is a renowned expert in O’Keeffe’s time in Texas and published “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Wartime Texas Letters” in 2020 and “Georgia O’Keeffe: Watercolors, 1916-1918” in 2016.

Von Lintel’s talk, “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Letters at WT,” will take place in the Blackburn Room, with refreshments to follow in the Texas Poets’ Corner, both located on the library’s second floor. The event is free and open to the public.

Six letters were inside a briefcase given to Von Lintel by Jan Minton, a Canyon woman and granddaughter of Ted Reid, a friend and former romantic interest of O’Keeffe during her years in Canyon. O’Keeffe sent the letters to Reid and other members of his family in Canyon and elsewhere.

“Jan came into my office carrying a heavy briefcase one day in 2016, around the time I was working on my first book project on O’Keeffe,” Von Lintel said. “The briefcase was full of O’Keeffe-related memorabilia that Jan’s family had preserved over the years, including the letters.

“When I opened the case, and saw those letters, I couldn’t believe it. But the provenance of Jan’s family made sense, so I believed they could be real. I asked several experts from the O’Keeffe Museum to look at them to see if anything looked suspicious and they said no—the handwriting looked right, and the provenance made sense.”

O’Keeffe came to Amarillo in 1912 to teach for the new Amarillo City Public School system. She left to spend time in the East, then returned to the Panhandle to teach at the then-West Texas State Normal College from 1916 to 1918.

“O’Keeffe did keep in touch with Ted and his family members, and we have other kinds of evidence to corroborate that,” Von Lintel said. “Jan felt that because her grandfather and O’Keeffe met at WT, that the materials should stay in the WT collection, so we thought Cornette Special Collections was a perfect place to preserve them.”

The Special Collections and University Archives Department has housed the briefcase, including the letters, for a few years. The six pieces of correspondence will be unveiled at the event and placed in a locked display case.

The six letters “show how connected O’Keeffe felt to certain people she met when she worked here, how they forged a lifetime friendship,” Von Lintel said. “It is also quite magical to have original letters in the hand of O’Keeffe in our collection; most of her letters are in bigger places like the Yale University Beinecke Library, but to have our own few letters is really exciting.”

The letters are an important acquisition, said Shawna Kennedy-Witthar, director of information and library resources.

“They are representative of Georgia O’Keeffe’s connections to WT and Canyon, and they are a significant addition to the library’s special collections,” Kennedy-Witthar said. “We are happy to now share these with the O’Keeffe art community”

Von Lintel recently was featured speaking about O’Keeffe’s time in Canyon on “Around Texas with Chancellor John Sharp,” in which Sharp highlights The Texas A&M University System’s students, faculty and staff.

This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: O’Keeffe letters to be added to WT’s Cornette Library collection