New Mexico became Georgia O'Keeffe's main home and a defining artistic subject.
O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929 and returned repeatedly before moving there permanently after Alfred Stieglitz's death. She was drawn to the region's intense light, high desert, cliffs, adobe buildings, churches, and animal bones. These subjects became central to her visual vocabulary.
She lived and worked at Ghost Ranch and later maintained a home in Abiquiú. Her paintings of the landscape were not conventional travel illustrations; she simplified forms and used large areas of color to create highly personal compositions. Works featuring hills, doors, bones, and desert horizons helped make New Mexico inseparable from her public identity.
O'Keeffe's connection with the state is sometimes reduced to a single style, but her New Mexico paintings span decades and include both recognizable imagery and abstraction. She continued to paint there into old age, and Santa Fe became the location of the museum dedicated to her work.