Latino Show Offers Honest Cross-Section

For all of their reliance on visual sensitivity, museum curators and gallery directors have been profoundly insensitive to artists of shades other than white.

Artists of non-European ethnic descent, as well as women artists, have long been relegated to the shadows of the American art world. Major exhibition spaces rarely feature them, partially because those who make such choices are, themselves, predominantly white and male.

A spirit of revisionism has emerged in the last few years, however, and the art community is beginning to take measures to compensate for its long-standing biases. Traveling survey shows, like the recent “Hispanic Art in the United States” and “The Latin American Spirit” (at the San Diego Museum of Art through Sunday), are two of the most visible manifestations of this effort to revise traditional histories of art, making them more inclusive.

Unfortunately, the over-zealous organizers of these shows attempt to correct decades of neglect in single, sweeping gestures. In the process, they promote an artificial, homogenizing view of their subjects.

To have an enduring impact, the revisionist spirit must yield more than just efforts to sum up the art of an overlooked period, region or group, and then tuck it away again, out of sight, as if exhausted. It must inject museum curators, gallery directors and scholars with the urge to dig deeper into realms that had long been considered peripheral. It must encourage them to move this work to the center, expose it and let it speak for itself.

“Latin Alternatives,” opening today at the David Zapf Gallery (2400 Kettner Blvd., through Aug. 12), embodies this spirit without suffering its pitfalls. Without great fanfare or lofty theoretical pretense, the show presents a small sampling of work by six Latino artists. It challenges the suspicious notion that all artists loosely labeled “Latino” or “Hispanic” share a common vocabulary of subject matter and styles. Instead, the show confirms that a healthy pluralism prevails among such artists, as among artists in general in the ‘80s.

Ethnicity surfaces in these works no more than in any cross-section of contemporary art. The paintings of Santiago Vaca, a native of Ecuador, are insistently political, a trait that is often associated with the politically volatile nations of Latin America. His painting, “The Interrogation Room,” shrieks with the terror of political oppression, but a confrontational approach to such disturbing subject matter can also be found in the politically charged art of North Americans Leon Golub and Sue Coe.

Vaca’s work also has a cooler, more ironic side that yields an even more scathing indictment of abused power. In “The Pope’s Visit to Chile,” he chides the intimacy between the church and the military, the institutionalized forces of religion and death, by picturing the Pope bent over a skeleton in an ambiguous pose. A veil of paint nearly whitewashes the underlying foundation of bones that supports both the image and the power structure it portrays.

In the color-saturated landscapes of Los Angeles-based painter Raoul de la Sota, Spanish titles and Mexican locales are all that hint of the artist’s cultural identity. These factors are negligible, though, for De la Sota’s main concerns are the universal elements of light and color.

In “Noche de Nopal,” he bestows a dense, twisting mass of cactus with an artificial, theatrical glow. The spiny plant’s gestural form lends it a human quality, and its lurid violets, reds and mauves give the teeming mass a restless, anxious presence.

For San Diegan David Avalos, contemporary urban culture provides icons of greater urgency and currency than the traditional, sacred symbols of the church. His “Hubcap Milagro” consists of layer upon layer of potent sexual, societal and religious references.

David Diaz is represented by a series of prints that illustrate a book of poetry, and another series inspired by three Zora Neale Hurston works of fiction and folklore. The beauty of these silk screen prints, their rich, velvety color and woodblock-like effect, is engaging, but, given their illustrative purpose, they need the collaboration of their texts to feel complete, and those are not provided here.

Victor Salvatierra, a graduate student at UC San Diego, employs an equally imaginative and absorbing technique in his moody scenes of boat wrecks. Salvatierra sets the weighty, silhouetted vessels along the bottom of his horizontal panels, and lets the boards’ plywood grain speak for the hazy, haunting sky.

Tijuana artist Romel Rosas indulges in light-hearted whimsy in his “Video Reflection Series;” his “Mal de Ojo (Evil Eye)” drawings carry more weight. Vague, ethereal faces stare out from each sheet, while a hand extends a small object--a radio, a screw--as if the purveyor of supernatural powers. Drawn in delicate, cloudy grays, the faces exude an odd, slightly disconcerting magnetism.

These artists hardly need the coddling embrace of affirmative action. The exposure it affords serves them well, however, as long as it allows their work to speak for itself, and not for an entire ethnic community.