Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe is dedicated to the life, art, and legacy of one of America's most celebrated painters, the artist most completely identified with the landscape and light of New Mexico. Founded in 1997 and housed in a converted Spanish Colonial Revival building in downtown Santa Fe, the museum holds the world's largest collection of O'Keeffe's work, including more than 3,000 works in all media spanning her career from student work made before 1910 through the last paintings completed before her death in 1986 at age 98.

O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929, drawn by the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan, and she returned every summer for years before finally settling permanently in Abiquiu in 1949 after the death of her husband, the photographer and gallery director Alfred Stieglitz. The landscape of the high desert, the bleached bones scattered on the mesa, the elongated forms of the Pedernal mesa against the vast sky, became her primary subject in the New Mexico years, producing the images most widely associated with her name. The museum contextualizes this work within her full career, showing the abstract paintings of her early New York years, the flower paintings that made her famous, and the late works made as her eyesight failed but her ambition remained undiminished.

Beyond the permanent collection, the museum presents rotating exhibitions that situate O'Keeffe in relationship to her contemporaries and to the artists she influenced, making it a genuine resource for understanding the history of American modernism rather than simply a shrine to a single figure. Research scholarships and artist residencies at O'Keeffe's homes in Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch extend the museum's reach into the landscape she painted. Tours of the Abiquiu home, where O'Keeffe lived and worked for decades and which still contains her personal belongings and studio equipment, can be arranged through the museum and represent one of the most intimate encounters with an artist's working life available anywhere in the Southwest.