Georgia O’Keeffe painted many of her famous landscapes and skull works in New Mexico.
She first visited the state in 1917 and began spending extended periods there in the 1920s. Its desert terrain, cliffs, adobe buildings, flowers, and animal bones became central subjects in her art.
O’Keeffe often collected bones and other objects from the landscape, then arranged them as powerful shapes against sky or abstract backgrounds. Works such as Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue show how she transformed regional materials into compositions with national and symbolic associations.
New Mexico was not O’Keeffe’s birthplace; she was born in Wisconsin. She also maintained important ties to New York and Lake George, but the state became the defining setting of her later life and artistic identity.