New Mexico became Georgia O'Keeffe's main landscape subject after her 1929 visit.
O'Keeffe first visited northern New Mexico in the summer of 1929 and returned regularly for many years. The region offered visual subjects that were very different from the urban and floral imagery associated with her earlier New York period: desert cliffs, adobe buildings, churches, ranches, bones, and broad skies.
She spent part of each year in New Mexico while maintaining a connection to New York. In 1949, three years after Alfred Stieglitz died, she moved permanently to the state. She lived and worked in Abiquiú and later spent time at Ghost Ranch, both of which became central to her public image.
New Mexico is sometimes described as merely a late setting in her career, but the state became a sustained source of motifs and compositions. O'Keeffe repeatedly revisited particular places, including the cliffs she called the Black Place and the white walls of the Ranchos de Taos church.