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There's pressure, then there's pressure.

It had to be sweaty when Andrew John Cecil and Suzanne Sbarge sat down to map out the inaugural exhibition for 516 Arts, the new museum-style gallery on Central Avenue between Fifth and Sixth streets.

Hopes are riding on the place, hopes that it will invigorate the city's art scene, hopes that it will draw people - from all over the map - to Downtown, hopes that it will spur revitalization.

Money's riding on it too. The McCune Charitable Foundation and the Albuquerque business community kicked in well over half a million dollars to renovate and operate the storefront gallery dedicated to arts and culture, former home of the beloved art center Magn¡fico.

The opening show had to make a statement - that this is a gallery to contend with, a gallery not to miss, whether you live on the other side of town or the other side of the country.

And so Sbarge, executive director of 516 Arts, and Cecil, program director, sat down.

"We started a list," Cecil said. "We got to over 100 artists we wanted to invite to the show."

After a lot of "expanding and contracting," he said, they settled on 23 New Mexico artists, many of them legends, others less well known, but all active contributors to the evolution of art in the state through work and teaching.

Simply put, the show is great.

Titled "Green," it features 56 pieces by the 23 artists in painting, sculpture, photography and digital arts. It's a dream team from Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, Acoma, Hondo, Cochiti and Apache Creek.

The esteemed Larry Bell offers "Cube 44," one of his benchmark glass cubes, the simplest of form and material reflecting a complex environment inside and out. Bell, whose work is exhibited worldwide, masterfully blends science and art, inspiring awe.

Also among the elder statesmen are Mary Lewis Garcia, the Acoma potter whose designs draw on tradition but are exquisitely fresh; Florence Pierce, renowned for her minimalist resin reliefs awash in spirituality; and Frederick Hammersley, whose abstracts are a study in contrasting color and shape.

There's Joel-Peter Witkin, the Albuquerque photographer whose celebrated staged tableaux of, shall we say, unusual people, have at times shocked and outraged the public; and the thoughtful Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who infuses American Indian iconography with an abstract sensibility.

Delilah Montoya and Douglas Kent Hall deftly take photography to the people, Montoya in provocative images of female boxers and Hall in the light cast on the human condition.

There's no best in a show like this; each work is powerful and important. Each pushes the envelope and, therefore, will attract some and repel others, as the best contemporary art must do.

I was most drawn to the abstract paintings of Tom Dixon of Taos, exhilarating canvases of layered paint, scratched and etched and peeled to a state of colorful old plaster with, like a vintage ladder, a thousand stories to tell.

The wonderful painter Marc Ouellette brings flawless impressionist technique to small moments of personal isolation in "Apple," "Cane" and "Virus." He frames his images like quick snapshots, bathed in rich, fluid light. Iva Morris mixes classical form with surreal content in the gorgeous oil "Cat's Cradle." And Grant Hayunga takes the landscape to a new place in the mixed-media paintings "Black and Blue" and "Dawn," topping complex skies with childlike drawings.

Every great show has a piece that stops you in your tracks. Here, it's an installation by Mary Tsiongas of Albuquerque, part of a body of work titled "When the Hunter Gathers."

In "Hindsight," a real, taxidermy deer drinks from a pond formed of Plexiglas. The pond is pierced by arrows, all standing upright. Behind are three bullseyes - "Bighorn Target," "Coyote Target" and "Deer Target" - imprinted with the blended digital images of human and animal faces. It's as powerful a statement on hunting as you'll ever see.

The exhibition is dedicated to the distinguished painter and sculptor Luis Jimenez, who died in a studio accident the day his invitation to "Green" was sent out.

The show, along with the terrific regional contemporary exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum, testifies to and catalogs the rich state of modern art in New Mexico. It's a rare chance to see the legends and the new guard in one place.

Cecil said that in choosing pieces, he often went for the "goose bump factor."

I felt them.