In 1916, O’Keeffe accepted a position teaching art at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon, Texas. Outspoken and eccentric, she struggled to make connections in the community, but she found inspiration and rejuvenation in the vastness of the Panhandle landscape. “The wonderful great big sky makes me want to breathe so deep that I’ll break,” she exclaimed in a letter to the dealer Alfred Stieglitz, one of many occasions in which she praised the natural beauty of West Texas.

In 1917, O’Keeffe produced a sequence of three small watercolors, including this one, chronicling sunrise. Working on sheets of newsprint, she layered fluid washes of ultramarine pigment, creating concentric bands of color that suggest the gradual diffusion of sunlight into the morning sky. Acquired directly from the artist following her 1966 retrospective at the Carter, these three watercolors offer a remarkable record of her early forays into abstraction.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)