Art: Gubernatorial Show

In the office of New Mexico's governor one day this week, picture hangers were hard at work. Under the supervision of Dr. Reginald Fisher, art director of Santa Fe's Museum of New Mexico, they carefully placed 14 paintings on the walls of the governor's private office and its anteroom. Next morning, when Governor Edwin Mechem and his staff arrived, everybody had a good look and a lively discussion.

Art came to the governor's bare, functional suite because Mechem wanted to show off New Mexico's painters. Mechem laid down only two restrictions: nothing too extreme or experimental, nothing that would offend good taste. Fisher hung his first exhibit in the governor's office in January 1951, has put in a new set of pictures about every three or four months since. The current show includes work by New Mexico's well-known Peter Kurd, who contributed Ranch near Encino, a typical vast, sweeping Kurd landscape. But it also has works by less famed painters, and in some of their pictures New Mexico comes to life with surprising sharpness. Among the standouts: Ernest Blumenschein's Downtown Albuquerque, a view of rooftops and buildings from a hotel window; Kenneth Barrick's Motherless Child, a dimly glimpsed bracero woman carrying a child through a sandstorm.

The governor's rotating show got a lot of New Mexicans interested in art, including Ed Mechem. He bought three works himself. Says Museum Director Fisher enthusiastically: "He used to like strictly realistic stuff, Indians and cowboys. Now he even likes abstraction."