Georgia O'Keeffe made many paintings of desert landscapes and animal bones in New Mexico.
She first visited New Mexico in 1929 and returned regularly before moving there permanently after Alfred Stieglitz's death in 1946. The state's stark terrain, adobe buildings, churches, cliffs, flowers, and bleached bones became central subjects in her later work.
O'Keeffe spent time at Ghost Ranch and eventually maintained a home in Abiquiú. She described the northern New Mexico landscape as a place that had been meaningful to her since her first visit. Paintings such as Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue and Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills demonstrate how she transformed found bones into carefully arranged modernist images.
New Mexico did not replace her earlier subjects completely. She continued painting flowers and other natural forms, but the region gave her a distinctive visual vocabulary of intense sunlight, broad horizons, and weathered organic shapes.