Today is Inspire Your Heart with Art Day! Just in time for the occasion, we’re bringing back our popular Love Letter to Art Valentine’s Day challenge. So, get out those calligraphy pens and glitter glue – it’s time to get creative!

Submit your Love Letter to Art here.

Need some inspiration? Check out last year’s submissions here!

Couldn’t resist posting this for Valentine’s Day…

(via SFMOMA)

Happy Valentine’s Day from SFMOMA! Check out the explanation for how we picked the winning love letter (pictured here) for our Valentine’s Day project, and see who received an honorable mention on OPEN SPACE. <3

A musical love letter for Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1971 video installation, Swamp:

SWAMP

(A country song by Tammy)

Chord progression: Em, A7, F #

__________________________ 

Bobby bossed his Nancy around

She ran into the swamp

He said keep your camera eye on them catkin stalks and the other eye on the ground

Nancy whined she hated Passaic and Bobby got irritated

He mumbled hang a right with that camera lens but her focus became sedated

They say you should never shoot with your wife

In the toxic swamps of New Jersey

You could wind up in a real bad fight

And both end up with the scurvy

Nothing good never happened down there

In the warm warm swamps of Jersey

Catching stickers in your hair n’ losin’ your footwear

Will getcha hookworm and make the neighbors stare

Bossing each other like two old bull frogs

In public’s kinda tacky and worse in a bog

(kazoo solo)

Lucky Bobby and Nancy had each other

A love letter written to Belle and Sebastian, a print by Justin Walsh and Nissa Ellison-Walsh:

Dear Seymour Stein,

Have you considered that we should be seeing other people? Maybe the stars of track and field? I know, I know… you’re just the boy done wrong, again. But I’m sick of waiting for the moon to rise when we’re together.

I’m the wrong girl for you. There’s too much love, but I still feel like I’m always wandering alone. You see, you’re always wrapped up in books, and with the state I am in, that leaves me feeling the loneliness of a middle distance runner.

So I’m waking up to us. Put the book back on the shelf, because there won’t be any more words written about you and me.

I know you’ll probably be hurt by this (is it wicked not to care?), but when I’m with you, the blues are still blue and in the state that I am in your expectations are just too much. I just want to be myself completely.

I wish I could say that my wandering days are over, but the truth is I don’t love anyone now.

You’ll probably tell your friends that I’m just another calculating bimbo. But I can see your future and if you, too, stop, look and listen, you’ll know that I’m right.

So don’t leave the light on baby, or at least not for me. But one day, if you find yourself caught in love again, remember that once you were mine, my funny little frog.

Stay loose,

Mary Jo

Photographer Alfred Stieglitz and painter Georgia O’Keeffe wrote each other more than 5,000 love letters over the course of their romantic relationship. In Stieglitz’s portraits of O’Keeffe, we are offered a glimpse into the intimate love shared by two great artists. Here are a few of Stieglitz’s photos in which O’Keeffe is both his model and muse.

If the relationship between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz  interests you, come check out tomorrow’s Free Tuesday program at noon, which dives right into the couple’s love letters. <3

Love letter to Edvard Munch’s Starry Night:

They say you never forget your first.

We met at the Getty, a lifetime ago. I wandered into the small gallery off to the side, and there you were, waiting for me. Sitting on the bench in front of you, I got lost in your skies. And then, I wept. You touched me so unexpectedly, yet I knew nothing about you. This place on the water, it is peace. It is serenity, it is love. I fear that I’ll never find this place again, but how lucky I am to have found it once.

You haunted me.  Did I haunt you? Do you even remember me?

I went back to visit the next week and you were gone. I’ll find you again someday.

Love letter to John Gutmann’s Promenade Deck, M.S. Brimanger, Pacific Ocean 1933

How did I find you? Why did I choose you?
You are so small and colorless. But you are filled with light and space.
I guess that means I should beware of shadows.
You show me an edge.
A place to bang into…  possible conflict.
A place to jump off of…  Is it a beginning or ending?
Moving forward toward a horizon, traversing sea and sky.
But you remind me there is always the chance of colliding
with the black hole of a broken heart.

A love letter written to Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare...:

A love letter written to the iPhone, which we totally consider a work of art (it’s in our permanent collection!).