New Mexico became Georgia O'Keeffe's principal home and artistic subject after 1949. She had first visited the state in 1917 and returned repeatedly before moving there permanently following Alfred Stieglitz's death.
The region offered O'Keeffe a visual world very different from New York: desert light, mountains, adobe architecture, cottonwood trees, animal bones, and broad skies. She lived and worked in Abiquiú and Ghost Ranch, creating paintings that made the northern New Mexico landscape internationally recognizable.
O'Keeffe did not abandon abstraction when she painted New Mexico. Instead, she used close views, simplified shapes, intense color, and unusual cropping to turn local forms into highly individual modernist compositions. Her paintings of the landscape are therefore both geographically specific and formally experimental.
New Mexico is sometimes described as merely a late-career setting, but it became central to her identity and visual language. O'Keeffe continued working there for decades and died in Santa Fe in 1986.