Georgia O'Keeffe began making regular trips to New Mexico in 1929. She traveled there during the summer and found a landscape that became one of the defining subjects of her mature work.
The region offered distinctive forms that differed from the flowers and New York scenes associated with her earlier career. O'Keeffe painted adobe buildings, crosses, bones, hills, and desert vegetation, often simplifying them into strong shapes and color fields. Her New Mexico subjects were based on direct observation, but she transformed them through cropping and abstraction.
The year 1929 marks the beginning of her recurring visits, not her permanent move. She continued to maintain an important connection with New York for years. After Alfred Stieglitz died in 1946, O'Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico and later divided her time between Abiquiú and Ghost Ranch.