Georgia O'Keeffe made the landscapes that defined her later career in New Mexico.
O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929 and returned repeatedly during the 1930s and 1940s. The region offered subjects that differed sharply from the urban and architectural imagery of her earlier New York period: cliffs, desert bones, adobe buildings, crosses, and broad skies. These motifs became central to her mature visual language.
She moved to New Mexico permanently in 1949, three years after Alfred Stieglitz died. She lived and worked in Abiquiu and later spent time at Ghost Ranch, north of Abiquiu. Paintings such as those of the Pedernal mountain, desert bones, and adobe forms are closely linked with this period.
New Mexico is sometimes grouped loosely with the neighboring Southwest, leading people to answer Arizona or Utah. O'Keeffe's best-known homes, studios, and landscapes, however, were specifically in northern New Mexico. The state became both her subject and her chosen home.