Ghost Ranch became one of Georgia O'Keeffe's most recognizable sources of inspiration. The dramatic ranch near Abiquiú, New Mexico, provided cliffs, bones, trees, and expansive skies that she repeatedly transformed into simplified modernist images.
O'Keeffe first visited the area in the 1930s and later maintained a house there. She famously described the landscape around Ghost Ranch as a place that had been painted in her mind before she ever saw it. Its red-rock formations and isolated terrain became inseparable from the public image of her New Mexico period.
Ghost Ranch is not the same as O'Keeffe's Abiquiú home, although both places were important to her. The ranch is also associated with the Presbyterian retreat and education center that operates there today.