Georgia O’Keeffe painted the landscapes that became central to her later career in New Mexico. She first visited the state in 1929 and returned repeatedly before settling there permanently after Alfred Stieglitz’s death.
The region offered subjects that differed sharply from the urban and floral motifs of her earlier New York period. O’Keeffe painted desert hills, cliffs, bones, churches, ranch buildings, and broad skies. She often reduced these subjects to strong shapes and simplified color fields rather than treating them as ordinary scenic views.
New Mexico is sometimes treated as merely a late setting in her biography, but the state changed both the subjects and visual vocabulary of her work. She maintained a New York connection for many years, and her New Mexico paintings span several decades. The state’s landscape became one of the defining subjects associated with her name and helped shape the popular image of O’Keeffe as an artist of the American Southwest.