Georgia O’Keeffe made many of her best-known desert paintings in New Mexico. The state’s mountains, adobe buildings, bones, crosses, and expansive skies became central subjects during the later decades of her career.
O’Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929 while staying at Taos. She returned repeatedly, often spending summers away from New York. The landscape offered a sharp contrast to Manhattan’s vertical architecture and to the urban art world surrounding her husband, Alfred Stieglitz.
She eventually lived in New Mexico year-round. Her homes at Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú gave her direct access to the forms and colors she had been collecting visually for years. She frequently drove through the landscape, gathered bones, and painted isolated natural objects.
O’Keeffe is sometimes described simply as a Southwestern painter, but New Mexico was specifically important. Its distinctive geology and Hispanic, Indigenous, and Spanish colonial visual traditions shaped the settings of many of her mature works.