Georgia O’Keeffe spent her final years in New Mexico, the state that became central to her mature art.
She first visited New Mexico in 1929 and returned repeatedly during the summers. The region’s cliffs, bones, adobe buildings, roads, and broad skies supplied subjects that differed sharply from the skyscrapers and interiors she had painted in New York. She moved there permanently in 1949 after Alfred Stieglitz’s death.
O’Keeffe lived and worked at homes in Abiquiú and Ghost Ranch. Her paintings of the landscape were not straightforward topographical records; she simplified and enlarged forms to create highly personal compositions. The state therefore became both a physical home and a defining visual vocabulary.
New Mexico is sometimes confused with Arizona in discussions of Southwestern modernism, but O’Keeffe’s principal homes and studios were in New Mexico.