Georgia O'Keeffe found the landscapes that shaped her mature work in New Mexico. She first visited the state in 1917 and returned regularly before making it her permanent home after Alfred Stieglitz's death in 1946.
The region offered subjects that became hallmarks of her art: enormous skies, rugged hills, adobe architecture, bones, roads, and stark desert forms. She spent summers at Ghost Ranch and later maintained a home in Abiquiú, north of Santa Fe. These places supplied recurring motifs rather than merely serving as scenery.
New Mexico is sometimes treated as the sole source of O'Keeffe's artistic identity, but her career also included New York, Virginia, Texas, Hawaii, and other locations. Her earlier abstractions and flower paintings were important before the southwestern landscapes became dominant. The state's significance lies in how deeply its forms and light matched her evolving visual language.