Georgia O'Keeffe created many desert-landscape and bone paintings in New Mexico. She first visited the state in 1917 and returned repeatedly before making it her permanent home.
The region offered subjects that became signatures of her art: desert hills, adobe buildings, crosses, flowers, animal bones, and the dry expanses around Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú. O'Keeffe often carried bones home from walks and arranged them as studio subjects.
New Mexico was not merely a backdrop. Its intense light, simplified forms, and distinctive architecture supported the spare, enlarged compositions for which she became famous. Her paintings transformed local objects into monumental images.
O'Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949, three years after Stieglitz's death. She maintained homes at Ghost Ranch and in Abiquiú and remained associated with the state until her death in Santa Fe in 1986.