New Mexico supplied the landscapes for Georgia O'Keeffe's famous 1930s Rio Grande paintings.
O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1917 and returned regularly beginning in 1929. The region's cliffs, desert, bones, churches, and broad skies became central subjects in her work, including views connected with the Rio Grande gorge.
Her New Mexico paintings were not merely travel souvenirs. She developed a sustained visual vocabulary from the state's architecture and geology, often isolating a fragment of landscape or presenting it with unusual scale and simplified forms.
Arizona, Colorado, and Texas also have distinctive southwestern landscapes, which can make the answer seem less obvious. O'Keeffe's long-term artistic and personal connection, however, was specifically with New Mexico, where she eventually lived permanently.