Georgia O'Keeffe spent her final decades in New Mexico. She first visited the state in 1929 and began making paintings inspired by its high desert, mountains, adobe buildings, bones, and intensely colored light.
O'Keeffe divided her time between New York and New Mexico for many years. She moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949, three years after Alfred Stieglitz died. Her homes and studios at Abiquiú and Ghost Ranch became important parts of her artistic life, and the region supplied subjects that reappeared throughout her later work.
New Mexico is more precise than simply saying the American Southwest. O'Keeffe also traveled and painted in other western locations, including Texas, where she had taught earlier in her career. Her New Mexico paintings helped establish a lasting public association between her art and the state’s distinctive landscape.