Georgia O’Keeffe made many of her best-known landscapes in New Mexico.
She first visited New Mexico in 1917 and returned repeatedly during the 1920s. The state’s adobe buildings, bones, cliffs, deserts, churches, and vast skies became central subjects in her paintings and drawings. Her New Mexico work helped define the public image of her art.
O’Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949, three years after Alfred Stieglitz died. She lived first in Abiquiú and later maintained a home at Ghost Ranch, north of the village. The landscape around both places supplied recurring motifs, including the Pedernal mountain, which she famously described as a place she could paint because it was “my private mountain.”
New Mexico is sometimes treated as merely a late-career setting, but it influenced O’Keeffe for nearly seven decades, from her first visit in 1917 until her death in Santa Fe in 1986.