Ghost Ranch became Georgia O’Keeffe’s celebrated New Mexico home and a major source of paintings.
O’Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1917 and returned repeatedly. In 1940, she acquired a house at Ghost Ranch, a dramatic area near Abiquiú known for multicolored cliffs, mesas, and expansive skies. The landscape became one of the defining subjects of her later work.
She painted the surrounding terrain in sharply simplified forms, often isolating a cliff, road, tree, or section of sky. The setting supplied both visual material and personal privacy. O’Keeffe also maintained a home in the village of Abiquiú, where she lived and worked for many years.
Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú are related but not interchangeable. Ghost Ranch is the large landscape and retreat area, while the Abiquiú property was her separate village home. Paintings associated with the region helped establish O’Keeffe as a central figure in American modernism and in popular ideas about the visual identity of the Southwest.