The Black Place

The Black Place features an unusually muted palette for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Southwestern paintings: the composition is dominated by shades of white and gray, relieved only by a thin strip of blue sky at the top. “The Black Place” was the name she gave her favorite location to paint, an area of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness (also known as the Bisti Badlands) located approximately 150 miles west of Abiquiu, New Mexico. While she painted numerous images of the region’s rounded, gray hills, here she depicted a low, sandy crest that reminded her of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, as she wrote to him: “When I see the country in its silvery beauty and forbidding blackness in my memory—it is so often almost as if I see you too—your silvery hair and grey clothes and black cape.”