Jindal’s blue dogs

Our governor stirred up controversy with his proposed budget cuts to state arts spending, but, ironically, he keeps plenty of local art in his house. Gov. Bobby Jindal first noticed famed painter George Rodrigue’s even more famous blue dog in an episode of Friends, and now a handful of blue dogs—not the Southern Democrat kind—hang in the Louisiana Governor’s Mansion, including one on the wall directly behind Jindal’s desk.

Called “Stand Straight and Tall,” the 2001 painting on loan from the New Orleans Museum of Art features a blue dog in front of a vibrant American flag. Rodrigue says it was part of a series of post-9/11 works he created to raise more than $500,000 for American Red Cross of Greater New York.

“It surprised me when I found out they had a handful in the mansion,” Rodrigue says. “You never know where some of these end up. I remember presenting Clinton and Gore with their painting after the second inauguration.”

Last year Bobby and Supriya Jindal commissioned the 65-year-old artist to paint a portrait (pictured), with trademark blue dog included, for the mansion.

George Rodrigue: Images of Home, a collection of his early paintings, is on display now at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum at University of Louisiana Lafayette through Sept. 5.