As one of the foremost, if not the foremost American artist of the 20th Century, Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings hang in most of the top art museums around the country. Rather than fading away, her reputation seems to be growing stronger over time. One of her paintings, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, sold at auction for $43 million in 2016! And most of her famous paintings were done while staying or living in New Mexico.
O’Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1917. By the end of the 1920s, she was staying in New Mexico for part of the year on a regular basis – first in Taos and then by the mid-1930s in the Ghost Ranch/Abiquiu area. She would eventually buy houses at both Ghost Ranch and in Abiquiu and started living year-round in New Mexico in 1949. She continued to live in New Mexico until her death at the age of 98 in 1986. She once wrote to a friend, “… the country seems to call me in a way that one has to answer it …”
One of the locations in New Mexico that inspired many of her paintings from the 1940s is a “badland” area a little more than 100 miles to the west of Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu in the middle of Navajo country. She called the area the Black Place. With the roads not being what they are today, her trips to the Black Place were serious expeditions that included several days of camping out with one of her friends at her chosen painting location.
As you can see, the heavily eroded landscape has exposed volcanic ash and river deposits from tens of millions of years ago.
