Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico landscape series featuring a dark, barren formation was called Black Place.
Black Place refers to a group of paintings based on a stark volcanic or eroded landscape near Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico. O'Keeffe found the formation visually compelling because of its dark surfaces, long horizontal shape, and contrast with the surrounding desert. She translated that scenery into simplified compositions rather than making topographical records.
The series belongs to the New Mexico phase of her career, when she repeatedly returned to a limited group of personally meaningful subjects. Her paintings from this period include cliffs, ranch buildings, bones, flowers, and distant mountains. The repeated subjects were not simply copies; changes in scale, color, and viewpoint altered their emotional effect.
Black Place is easy to confuse with the Red Hills and other named landscape subjects associated with Ghost Ranch. The title refers to the dark formation itself, not to a town, museum, or broad name for all of O'Keeffe's New Mexico paintings.