Georgia O'Keeffe spent her later life in New Mexico.
She first visited New Mexico in 1929 and returned regularly for many years. The state's mesas, adobe buildings, bones, crosses, and desert plants became major subjects in her work. She found a visual environment very different from the dense urban setting of New York.
O'Keeffe maintained a New York connection for much of her career, but New Mexico increasingly became her main artistic home. She lived and worked at Abiquiu and also used a house near Ghost Ranch. In 1949, three years after Alfred Stieglitz's death, she moved permanently to New Mexico.
The state is often treated as the subject of all her best-known paintings, but O'Keeffe also painted New York skyscrapers, Lake George scenes, flowers, and abstract forms. New Mexico was a central chapter of her career, not the whole of it.