Georgia O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929.
The trip marked a major turning point in her artistic life. She traveled west from New York with the photographer Paul Strand's wife, Rebecca Salsbury James, and began spending part of many years in the region. The dramatic mountains, desert forms, bones, flowers, and adobe buildings became recurring subjects in her work.
O'Keeffe did not immediately abandon New York. For years she divided her time between the city and New Mexico, eventually making the Southwest her permanent home. Her New Mexico paintings helped create the public image most closely associated with her mature career.
Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado also contain dramatic western landscapes, but New Mexico was the state most deeply tied to O'Keeffe's later life and art. Her homes at Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú gave her direct access to the landscape she repeatedly painted.