Georgia O'Keeffe called her dark New Mexico landscape series the Black Place paintings.
The Black Place was a rugged area near Ghost Ranch, north of Abiquiu, New Mexico. O'Keeffe described it as a place of dark hills and eroded land, and she painted it from multiple viewpoints and at different times. The works use simplified forms and strong contrasts rather than treating the landscape as a conventional topographical view.
O'Keeffe began this group of paintings in 1944. The name refers to the appearance of the landscape itself, not to a black pigment or a separate artistic movement. Her New Mexico paintings often turn specific places into highly distilled compositions.
The Black Place is sometimes confused with the nearby Red Hills, another recurring subject in her work. Both locations belonged to the landscape around Ghost Ranch, but their colors and forms gave them distinct identities in her paintings.