The Black Place inspired Georgia O'Keeffe's repeated paintings of a black cliff in New Mexico.
The Black Place was a remote landscape near Ghost Ranch, west of Abiquiu. O'Keeffe described it as a group of dark hills and eroded forms that she found visually compelling. She painted the site repeatedly from the 1940s into the 1950s.
Unlike the colorful buildings and bones that also appear in her work, the Black Place offered a stark arrangement of dark earth, pale sky, and sharply carved land. O'Keeffe often transformed observed places through scale and simplification rather than making conventional topographical views.
The Black Place is often confused with Ghost Ranch itself. Ghost Ranch was the broader property and landscape where O'Keeffe lived and worked for periods; the Black Place was a particular nearby subject. These New Mexico locations helped shape the distinctive geography associated with her later paintings.