Above: The landscape of Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch in Abiquiú

O’Keeffe in the High Desert

On her first visit to New Mexico in 1917, Georgia O’Keeffe was awestruck by the state’s vast skies and stark landscapes. She traveled back and forth from New York to northern New Mexico for many years but eventually moved there permanently in 1949. O’Keeffe conveyed her passion for the land and its culture through paintings of sweeping high-desert landscapes and varicolored sandstone cliffs, as well as in still lifes incorporating skulls, feathers, bones and Pueblo pottery.

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

"My Front Yard, Summer" (1941), by Georgia O'Keeffe, at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe - Photo by Hideaway Report editor

Discreetly set in an adobe-colored structure in downtown Santa Fe, this museum celebrates all stages of O’Keeffe’s pioneering work, from her early abstract watercolors and well-known flower depictions to her New York cityscapes and New Mexico landscapes. Works of other contemporary American modernists are also exhibited to show the varying styles of the time. The video presentation dealing with O’Keeffe’s childhood and marriage to photographer Alfred Stieglitz, plus personal interviews on her ranch in Abiquiú, is extremely worthwhile.

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
217 Johnson Street, Santa Fe. Tel. (505) 946-1000

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