New Mexico became Georgia O’Keeffe’s main lifelong landscape subject.
O’Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1917, when she traveled to Santa Fe and nearby areas. She returned regularly during the 1920s and 1930s, finding subjects in the state’s stark mountains, desert terrain, adobe buildings, bones, and architectural forms.
Her paintings of New Mexico helped create some of the most recognizable images in American modernism. She repeatedly worked around Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú, translating regional forms into simplified compositions rather than producing conventional documentary landscapes.
O’Keeffe moved permanently from New York to New Mexico in 1949, three years after Stieglitz died. She maintained homes and studios in Abiquiú and Ghost Ranch. Although she also painted flowers, city architecture, and other subjects, New Mexico is the place most closely linked with her mature artistic identity.