Georgia O'Keeffe spent summers in Texas beginning in 1917 while teaching at West Texas State Normal College.
O'Keeffe moved to Canyon, Texas, in 1916 to head the art department at the school now known as West Texas A&M University. During her time there, she explored the open landscape around the Texas Panhandle and began making drawings and paintings based on its broad skies, ravines, and distant horizons.
Her summers in Texas were artistically important because they helped her move beyond the academic realism she had been taught. The landscape encouraged simplified forms and bold arrangements that connected with the emerging American modernist movement.
New Mexico later became the place most strongly associated with O'Keeffe, but Texas came earlier in her Southwestern experience. She visited New Mexico in 1917 and returned repeatedly before moving there permanently after Alfred Stieglitz's death. The two states therefore appear together in biographies, but the teaching post and its early summer landscapes belong to Texas.