Georgia O'Keeffe called the dark New Mexico cliffs she painted repeatedly the Black Place.
The Black Place was a landscape near Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico. O'Keeffe painted it many times, transforming an eroded, dark-toned formation into a stark subject of simplified shapes, shadows, and ridges.
The location was also known as the Pledgeless, and O'Keeffe described it as about 150 miles from her house by road. She became fascinated by the contrast between the black cliffs and the surrounding desert light. Her repeated attention to one place shows how she often worked through sustained observation rather than treating landscape as a single-view souvenir.
The Black Place is distinct from the White Place, another group of cliffs near Abiquiú that became a major O'Keeffe subject. The similar descriptive names can cause confusion, but they refer to different landscapes and different visual effects in her New Mexico paintings.