This is Georgia O’Keeffe country

SANTA FE, N.M. — “When I got to New Mexico, that was mine,” artist Georgia O’Keeffe once declared. “As soon as I saw it, that was my country. It fitted to me exactly.”

So it’s appropriate that the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the only museum in the world dedicated to an internationally acclaimed artist who also happened to be American — and a woman — is located in downtown Santa Fe.

The museum houses the world’s largest permanent collection of work by this pioneering, 20th-century modernist, whose name has become synonymous with the landscape of the desert Southwest.

Immortalized for her lush, oversized, brilliantly colored images of flowers and flower parts — often given Freudian interpretations, which the artist herself rejected — O’Keeffe is equally famous for her depictions of northern New Mexico’s stunning geological formations and bright-blue sky, the latter often seen through sun-bleached animal skulls, bones and antlers.

Many of her drawings, oil paintings, watercolors and pastels capture the multi-hued canyons, cliffs, spires and pillars surrounding Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, and often include the flat-topped Pedernal, which the artist called her “private mountain.”

O’Keeffe lived in Abiquiu or at Ghost Ranch for more than 40 years before deteriorating health led her to move an hour’s drive south to Santa Fe, where she died in 1986 at age 98.

Open to the public, Ghost Ranch is known as both O’Keeffe’s sanctuary and as the site of numerous paleontological discoveries, including a dinosaur quarry where the bones of Coelophysis, New Mexico’s state fossil, were first unearthed.

O’Keeffe’s Southwestern work is the focus of “Georgia O’Keefe and the Faraway: Nature and Image,” a special exhibition at her namesake museum through May 5, 2013.

In addition to artwork, this exhibition opens a window into the private life of the reclusive artist through displays of O’Keeffe’s personal letters, clothing, art supplies, and the camping equipment she carried while trekking through “our most beautiful country” in search of subjects for future masterpieces.