Georgia O'Keeffe painted many of her famous desert landscapes and animal-bone works in New Mexico.
She first visited the state in 1917 and returned regularly from 1929 onward. Its cliffs, adobe buildings, desert plants, and bleached bones became central subjects in her mature art. She found that the region offered a visual language very different from New York's urban environment.
O'Keeffe collected bones from the desert and used them as subjects in paintings such as Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue. She also painted the architecture and terrain around places including Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu.
New Mexico was more than a source of motifs for O'Keeffe. It became the setting of her daily life and artistic independence. After Stieglitz's death in 1946, she spent increasing amounts of time there and eventually made the state her permanent home. Her New Mexico paintings helped define popular ideas about Southwestern modernism.