New Mexico became Georgia O'Keeffe's main artistic landscape after her first visit there in 1929. The state's high desert, mountains, adobe architecture, bones, and broad skies supplied subjects that appeared repeatedly in her paintings and drawings.
O'Keeffe had already established a reputation in New York, but New Mexico offered a very different environment from the city's galleries and apartments. She returned regularly and eventually made the region her permanent home. Her work from New Mexico is among the most recognizable American art of the twentieth century.
The state is sometimes reduced to a backdrop in summaries of O'Keeffe's career, but it was a sustained source of observation rather than a single short visit. She transformed local forms into simplified compositions while retaining their sense of place. Her New Mexico paintings also helped shape popular ideas about Southwestern modernism.