A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY
Taos has long drawn artists seeking something beyond the noise—something elemental. In the high desert of northern New Mexico, Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin found not just quiet, but clarity.Both artists left New York at the height of their careers—not in retreat, but in pursuit.
O’Keeffe had been immersed in the energy of the New York art scene, married to Alfred Stieglitz, and surrounded by acclaim. But it was the desert that called to her. After her first trip to New Mexico in 1929, she returned nearly every summer for two decades before permanently relocating to Abiquiú. There, she painted the same hills, bones, and adobe forms again and again—not out of repetition, but reverence. Solitude, for O’Keeffe, was a way of seeing more clearly.
Agnes Martin, too, found early success in New York, even exhibiting alongside the Abstract Expressionists. But in 1967, at the peak of her visibility, she walked away. She gave up her studio, disappeared from the art world for several years, and eventually resettled in Taos. Her life became one of quiet rhythm and spiritual rigor. For Martin, solitude was not escape—it was discipline, devotion, and the only condition under which true inspiration could emerge.
While the two never met, their paths mirrored one another. They each turned inward and westward—leaving the art world’s center to live on their own terms. They made space for stillness. And from that stillness, they made enduring work.