New Mexico supplied Georgia O'Keeffe with the desert landscapes she painted after moving there permanently.
O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929 and returned repeatedly throughout the 1930s and 1940s. After Alfred Stieglitz died in 1946, she moved permanently from New York to New Mexico. She lived and worked mainly in Abiquiú and Ghost Ranch, where she painted cliffs, doors, crosses, bones, flowers, and expansive skies.
New Mexico was not simply a backdrop in her work. Its light, distances, architectural forms, and dry landscape gave O'Keeffe a new visual vocabulary. The state is sometimes confused with nearby Arizona because both are associated with the American Southwest, but O'Keeffe’s principal homes and studios were in New Mexico. Her New Mexico paintings helped make the region central to the public image of American modernism.