Michael Hurd preserving famous parents' land and legacy

Apr. 12—Michael Hurd can tell you exactly how long he lived in Chicago: "Two years, three months, four days, and two hours," he claims.

Following a controversy that started over a cartoon in a newspaper, Hurd had to uproot his life in an effort to safeguard his parents' artistic legacy — as well as the very land they lived on. That's what he's been doing ever since, in addition to following an artistic muse of his own.

Hurd, the son of famed artists Peter Hurd (1904-1984) and Henriette Wyeth (1907-1997), paints "every damn day" and presides over 2,400 acres of land that straddles the Ruidoso River in San Patricio in southeastern New Mexico. The original 40-acre site his parents purchased in the mid-1930s is on the National Register of Historic Places and is where Hurd built a gallery to honor his parents and host guests to help fund maintenance of the property.

It all could've gone differently, thanks to President Lyndon Baines Johnson. In 1967, Peter Hurd painted the official portrait of Johnson that hung in the halls of Washington, D.C.'s National Portrait Gallery.

According to Michael Hurd, Johnson hated it, reportedly calling it the ugliest thing he'd seen in his life. So Peter Hurd started drawing long-nosed caricatures of the president, which got passed around in Washington, D.C. One even wound up in The Washington Post.

"Suddenly, we got audited," Michael Hurd says years later. "My parents had very mediocre accounting advice from guys in Roswell [where Peter Hurd was from] who were tremendously impressed by my father's fame. People said, 'Peter, you paint this whole ranch, don't you? You ought to be able to write the whole thing off.' It was a terrible piece of advice, but the guy who ran the office started writing everything off, and when the little grudge started, they went through the statutory limit of years and tacked on penalties; we ended up owing seven figures [in back taxes]."

Michael Hurd, born in Roswell and raised in Ruidoso, had to come home to the rescue. He left New Mexico at the age of about 12 to attend Middlesex boarding school in Concord, Massachusetts, where he and future New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson were students .

Hurd played guitar and banjo at Middlesex but never painted, he says, and that continued when he headed to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He married and moved to Chicago after college, where he worked in real estate, which prepared him for the financial crisis his parents were facing back home.

"I covered industrial real estate and commercial to some degree, but it wasn't my heart and soul," he says of his time in Chicago. "I knew how to do the present value computations. You split [property] into pieces for whatever the acquiring entity was. But I had a real terrible time going to farmers and seeing them sell off acreage to be turned into shopping malls. It was something about living [in New Mexico]; we made money doing it, but I just hated it."

Hurd bought a one-way ticket home and got to work; he says that a pair of longtime reputable art dealers in Texas were retiring, so he asked them for his parents' work back. He got estimates of the paintings' worth and started selling them for double and triple the prices. Hurd raised the needed money in a frenzy of action, he says, and was able to save the land.

Around the same time, he learned to love art again.

Hurd went back to college at New Mexico State University at his mom's urging and spent time painting with his dad in his mobile studio.

Earlier in life, Hurd says, his dad had discouraged him from becoming an artist. Peter Hurd had attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, for two years before becoming a private pupil of noted American artist N.C. Wyeth — Henriette's father — and said being an artist was even tougher than the military.

Michael Hurd says his mom, who had been raised and taught by N.C. Wyeth, was a loving and supportive parent but also demanded that he put his full effort into his work if he was going to pursue art. He would dutifully bring his work back after completing it, and she would surgically critique it.

"One of the first drawings I did in the modeling class with anatomy and the figure was a standing figure of a girl," he says. "I brought this pad of paper, an 18-by-24 charcoal drawing, and put it on a chair in the portal. And Mom, I think she looked at it for eight or nine seconds, and she said, 'That poor girl; is her right arm really six inches longer than her left?'"

Henriette Wyeth could instantly get her point across with an artist's economy of words, but she would use "I feel" rather than "I think" in her critiques, he says, which would make her response seem less academic.

Peter Hurd was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in his later years and died in 1984, but Henriette Wyeth lived to 1997 and saw the gallery come to fruition. Michael Hurd, who revels in painting New Mexico landscapes like his celebrated parents, won the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts for his own work in 2016. He recalls attending soil conservancy meetings with his father and says preserving the land his parents lived on is every bit as important as protecting their art.

Hurd designed the Hurd La Rinconada Gallery in 1985 to house his parents' art and also as a way to prevent people from accessing the ranch part of the property. A couple of years prior, he got his parents to sign limited edition prints, which helped put the estate back in the black. The gallery now hosts wine tastings as an additional fundraiser, and a group of guest homes on the property has helped keep Hurd from having to sell parts of the land to developers.

He says the Hurd estate is an environmental project of four square miles, and he hopes it stays that way in perpetuity. Peter Hurd, whose dad was an attorney, took an early interest in soil conservation and water rights. An oft-repeated family story notes that Peter Hurd visited a farm on the Pecos River with his dad, and when he saw that the wells weren't functioning and were pumping the land dry, it stuck with him forever.

"Pop subscribed to National Geographic for a lifetime. Anything to do with the environment, he was curious about," he says. "He drilled it into all of our heads, if we would listen, that it was your work and your consciousness that can change this. And your duty. And it's not just the use of the water; if you're not vigilant about sewer treatment, they'll put it right in the water."

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Hurd La Rinconada Gallery and Guest Homes are open by appointment only while renovations are underway through May 1. The property is at 105 La Rinconada, San Patricio, about 25 miles east of Ruidoso (which is 190 miles south of Santa Fe). Visit hurdgallery.com for more information.