Georgia O'Keeffe famously collected and painted bones that she found in the New Mexico desert.
She began using animal bones as recurring subjects after spending extended periods in New Mexico. Their bleached surfaces, strong contours, and associations with the desert gave her another way to explore scale, structure, and landscape.
Works such as Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue and Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills show how O'Keeffe combined bones with flowers, sky, and distant hills. She often isolated these objects against broad areas of color, making ordinary remains appear monumental.
The bones were not simply symbols of death. O'Keeffe treated them as beautiful, durable forms and sometimes carried them back to her studios. Her bone paintings are among the clearest visual links between her art and the New Mexico environment.