would oversee arts programs in all of the state's major cities. In 1965, a bill was drawn up and passed March 19 by New Mexico's Twenty-Seventh Legislature establishing the New Mexico Arts Commission. Anna Keener never shied away from asking for help for a worthy cause, and in June of 1965 she wrote to President Lyndon Johnson to ask for his support in passing a bill through Congress that would "establish a National Council on the Arts and a National Arts Foundation to assist in the growth and development of the arts in the United States."25
During this productive time the exhibition Recent Paintings by Anna E. Keener opened at the Jonson Gallery of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque on September 27, 1964, despite Raymond Jonson's (18911982) best efforts to dissuade his friend Anna. In a letter sent earlier in the year, Jonson wrote to Keener, "I cannot encourage anyone to exhibit here for the simple reason it is hardly worthwhile. The work involved and the expense add to it."26 He mentioned the artist's cost of refreshments for the opening reception, interviews with local papers, and the four-hundred-name mailing list sent to the artist to address by hand. Jonson expressed concern that Keener's eyes might not be up to that task, but offered to keep October free if she still wanted that time slot. Two lists survive from the exhibition planning, which reveal that Forest Fantasy Series #3 (Green) (plate 39) and Forest Fantasy Series #9 (Mine Shaft) (plate 40), were included in the university showthatfall. 27 Jonson and Keener had exhibited together earlier in their careers, both having been invited by Birger Sandzen to the Bethany College's annual Midwest Art Exhibit and to nearby McPherson High School's annual exhibitions from 1914 through 1920. Jonson moved to Santa Fe in 1924, and then taught at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque from 1934
The 1960s were also a dynamic period in the artist's career, in which she produced several important series of differing subjects and medium. The Mexico Series of 1963-1965 includes scenes she sketched while visiting Mexico for several months in 1963 with fellow Santa Fe artist Webb Young and his wife. Keener painted almost a dozen organic, abstract works in her Forest Fantasy Series of 1964, and then a similar number in the Pictograph and Petroglyph Series of 1968. In April of 1968 the artist sent Petroglyph Series #2 and Petroglyph Series #11 to the forty-fourth annual National Art Exhibit at Springville High School in Utah, a major exhibition that she exhibited in every year 1957 through 1971.
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