New Mexico became Georgia O'Keeffe's principal artistic landscape after she first visited the state in 1929.
O'Keeffe traveled to New Mexico during the summer of 1929 and found a subject world very different from New York's urban environment. She painted its cliffs, desert, adobe buildings, bones, flowers, and expansive skies. The landscape became central to her mature career.
She initially spent summers there while maintaining ties to New York and to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz. After Stieglitz died in 1946, O'Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico. She lived in Abiquiu and later spent increasing amounts of time in Santa Fe.
The state is sometimes treated merely as a backdrop for her work, but O'Keeffe described the region as a source of renewal and concentration. Her New Mexico paintings helped define how modern American art could interpret the Southwest without simply copying traditional landscape styles.