New Mexico became the primary landscape setting for Georgia O'Keeffe's later work.
O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1917, while traveling with the photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. She returned repeatedly and moved there permanently after Stieglitz's death in 1946. The region's dry climate, cliffs, adobe buildings, bones, and vivid skies became central subjects in her paintings.
Her connection to the state was not limited to one view or town. She worked around Taos, Abiquiú, Ghost Ranch, and the Chama River Valley. She famously described the landscape as something she had to paint because it was unlike anything she had seen before.
New Mexico is sometimes reduced to a simple background in accounts of O'Keeffe's art, but it shaped her choice of objects and her simplified forms. Her New Mexico paintings include landscapes, churches, ranch buildings, animal bones, and flowers, all transformed through close observation and abstraction.