Georgia O'Keeffe made many of her best-known desert paintings in New Mexico, a state she first visited in 1929 and later made her permanent home. She was drawn to its stark mountains, adobe buildings, bones, flowers, and broad skies.
O'Keeffe bought a house at Ghost Ranch in 1940 and acquired the Abiquiú property that became her principal home in 1945. She moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949, after Alfred Stieglitz's death. The state's visual forms became an enduring vocabulary in her work.
New Mexico is not simply a backdrop in O'Keeffe's art. She repeatedly revisited particular places, including the cliffs near Ghost Ranch and the door of her Abiquiú house. Those motifs helped make her paintings instantly recognizable while connecting modernism to regional landscape.