The history of art in the American Southwest cannot be told without centering the women who made it. From the Pueblo women who have been producing extraordinary ceramics for over a thousand years - a tradition that was and remains primarily female - to the 20th-century painters and sculptors who reshaped how the region understood itself, to the contemporary artists who are remaking Southwestern art for the 21st century, women have been a defining creative force of this region in ways that mainstream art history has been slow to fully acknowledge. Georgia O'Keeffe is the inevitable starting point, not because she was the first or the only, but because she chose to stay. O'Keeffe spent summers in New Mexico beginning in 1929, finally relocating permanently in 1949 following the death of her husband Alfred Stieglitz, and spent the last four decades of her life at Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu producing the work that would come to define both her career and the way the world sees the American desert. Her paintings of bones, flowers, and the landscape of the Piedra Lumbre valley did not merely represent the Southwest - they transformed it into an interior landscape, a terrain of the psyche that happened to be located in northern New Mexico. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, which holds the world's largest collection of her work, remains one of the most important art pilgrimage destinations in the United States. But O'Keeffe's dominance in the cultural imagination has sometimes obscured the depth of the women's artistic tradition that surrounded and preceded her. María Martínez of San Ildefonso Pueblo is perhaps the most consequential figure. Working in the early 20th century, Martínez - along with her husband Julian, who painted the designs - revived and refined the black-on-black pottery technique that had been practiced by her Pueblo ancestors and largely fallen out of use. The resulting ceramics were recognized almost immediately as among the finest art objects being produced anywhere in North America, and Martínez's international reputation - she received four honorary doctorates and met multiple U.S. presidents - did more to elevate the status of Pueblo pottery within mainstream art institutions than any other single development of the 20th century. Pablita Velarde, the Tewa artist from Santa Clara Pueblo born in 1918, spent a career painting the ceremonial and daily life of Pueblo peoples in a style that drew on both her Indigenous visual tradition and the formal art education she received in Santa Fe. Her work was radical in its insistence on documenting a living culture from inside it, refusing both the romanticization of Indigenous life that characterized most Anglo-American depictions and the assimilationist pressure that sought to erase it. Velarde's daughter, Helen Hardin, extended this tradition into a more explicitly modernist vocabulary, incorporating geometric abstraction derived from Pueblo pottery and kiva murals into paintings of extraordinary formal sophistication. Hardin's career was cut short by cancer in 1984, when she was only 41, but the body of work she left behind is among the most significant of any Southwestern artist of her generation. Dorothy Brett, who arrived in Taos in 1924 in the company of D.H. Lawrence and spent the rest of her long life - she died in 1977 at age 94 - painting Pueblo ceremonial subjects, was one of the most committed and skilled artists ever to work in the region. Brett's paintings bring an intimacy to their subjects that reflects decades of sustained relationship with the communities she depicted, and the best of her work holds up alongside the canonical Taos painters with whom she was contemporary. The contemporary women's art scene in the Southwest is extraordinarily vital. Melanie Yazzie, the Diné artist based in Colorado, works across printmaking, sculpture, and painting to explore issues of identity, Indigenous sovereignty, and the relationship between traditional knowledge and contemporary life. Her prints in particular - technically innovative and visually bold - connect the Southwestern Indigenous art tradition to global conversations about cultural survival and creative resilience. Rose Simpson, who works in Santa Clara Pueblo, has emerged as one of the most significant sculptors working anywhere in the American Southwest. Her ceramic figures - monumental in scale and psychological intensity, drawing on the Pueblo pottery tradition while pushing it into entirely new formal territory - have been acquired by major museums and exhibited in institutions across the country. Simpson's work refuses the false distinction between craft and fine art that has been used to relegate Indigenous ceramic production to a lesser category than European-derived sculpture, and her critical success has been a significant force in repositioning Pueblo ceramics within the mainstream art world. Emmi Whitehorse, the Diné painter who divides her time between New Mexico and New York, makes large-scale works on paper that seem to capture the quality of attention rather than specific landscapes - the trace of desert light rather than its description, a visual language developed from decades of living in and moving between radically different environments. Her work has been acquired by the Smithsonian, the Whitney Museum, and the National Gallery of Art, and she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Judy Chicago, who has spent significant time in New Mexico and whose work engages explicitly with the feminist tradition she helped define, represents a different vector of women's art in the Southwest - one rooted in the counter-cultural arts communities that found refuge in the region beginning in the 1960s and continuing through the present. Chicago's presence in Belen, New Mexico has connected the international feminist art movement to the Southwest's own tradition of women-centered creative practice. Finding the work of women artists in the Southwest requires knowing where to look. The Heard Museum in Phoenix has the most significant institutional collection of Indigenous women's art in the country, with deep holdings in Pueblo ceramics, Diné weaving, and contemporary work. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe is obvious but essential. LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe and Garth Greenan Gallery in New York are among the dealers most committed to representing significant women artists with Southwestern connections. The SWAIA market in Santa Fe - held each August on the Plaza - remains the single most concentrated marketplace for Indigenous women artists in the country, with hundreds of artists presenting work directly to collectors in a format that collapses the distance between maker and buyer. For any serious collector interested in Pueblo ceramics, Diné weaving, or contemporary Indigenous art by women, this annual market is unmissable. The historical record of women's art in the Southwest is still being reconstructed. Major museums are actively acquiring and exhibiting work that was excluded from canonical histories, and the market is beginning to reflect a revaluation that recognizes the depth and significance of contributions that mainstream art history spent decades ignoring. For collectors and visitors who engage with the Southwest's art world today, the women's tradition is not a supplement to the main story - it is the main story, and engaging with it seriously is the most important thing a collector or art traveler can do.