Pasadena

The grandfatherly black porter who grins on old boxes of Cream of Wheat finds his way into some whites-only famous art in La Monte Westmoreland’s puckish series of mixed-media collages. Our man stands near Christ as a waiter in Caravaggio’s “Supper at Emmaus” while Matthew obligingly holds the cereal box. Not far away, three black children holding mama’s purses pose next to a white fence; white children dance with mom, who’s in a rapturous TV-spot trance; and a white-kerchiefed elderly black woman looks lone and lorn.

With or without the little white boy he entertains on the label, the Cream of Wheat man is a surprisingly sturdy icon, dropping handily into familiar works of art or posing for Courbet. Occasionally, a tiny image of Uncle Ben peeps benignly into these scenes, keeping the faith for middle-class America. The durability of Westmoreland’s imagery is due both to his deft and sparing hand with the collage medium and to his low-key humorous outlook. Watermelon rinds in surprising places are the come-on; a message about cultural displacement is available to anyone who’s interested.

Most of Alonzo Davis’ acrylic-on-paper works have a disconcerting level of artlessness, as though anything he produced was worthy of public display. Davis likes iridescent effects and pinks and lavenders and splashes of paint. Works in the “Blanket Series” are woven, sometimes with bits of dried grass or twigs or glitter, or arrow shapes, or stars. Frames within frames are another pet device, most successful in “Light Dance,” a huge 12-part wall-covering. The gridwork of separate sheets of paper and the strictness of the overall design of concentric pastel rectangles effectively counterbalances a field of random spritzes and lazy zigzags. Davis-the-muralist’s baldly sloganeering serigraph for Art Against Apartheid reveals the same ingenuous approach to art-making that gives most of the paper pieces the air of vacuous arts-and-crafts. (Lizardi/Harp Gallery, 290 Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, to Feb. 27.)