Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) is one of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century, and her long relationship with New Mexico transformed both her art and the way the world sees the American Southwest. After decades of a celebrated career in New York - where she was a central figure in the circle around Alfred Stieglitz and a pioneer of American modernism - she first visited New Mexico in 1929 and felt immediately at home. The landscape of the high desert, with its red and ochre cliffs, its bleached animal skulls, its vast and unforgiving sky, gave her work a new intensity and a new vocabulary. She began dividing her time between New Mexico and New York, and after Stieglitz's death in 1946 she moved to the Southwest permanently - first to her house at Ghost Ranch near Abiquiú, then to her adobe in the village of Abiquiú itself. The subjects that define her mature work - the sun-bleached skull floating against the desert sky, the pelvic bones opening onto blue distance, the flat-topped mesas and red hills of the Piedra Lumbre - emerged from decades of close, patient looking at the landscape that surrounded her home. O'Keeffe lived and worked in New Mexico until her death at 98, becoming as much a part of the regional landscape as the red hills she painted. Her home at Abiquiú and her house at Ghost Ranch are now preserved as historic sites, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe - founded in 1997, the first museum in the United States dedicated to a woman artist - holds the largest collection of her work in the world. For visitors making a cultural pilgrimage to New Mexico, a visit to the museum and to the landscape that inspired her is considered essential.