Which New Mexico landmark appears in Georgia O'Keeffe's painting Pedernal?

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Pedernal Mountain appears in Georgia O'Keeffe's painting series titled Pedernal.

Cerro Pedernal, commonly called Pedernal, is a flat-topped mountain in northern New Mexico. O'Keeffe could see it from the area around Abiquiú, where she lived and worked, and it became one of her recurring landscape subjects.

She painted the mountain from different viewpoints and in different seasons, reducing its form to a strong horizontal mesa against broad skies. The landmark became so personally meaningful that O'Keeffe once remarked that it was her private mountain and that she painted it often because she could see it from her window.

Pedernal is sometimes confused with Ghost Ranch, a nearby area that also appears throughout O'Keeffe's work. Ghost Ranch is a landscape and former ranch property; Pedernal is the distinct flat-topped mountain rising from the surrounding terrain.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Oct. 2026

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