Artists Shine Critical Light on Columbus : History: An exhibit by American Indian and Chicano artists examines the mixed legacy of the explorer. What comes through is a great deal of pain, protest and humor.

Goodby, Columbus.

Or at least farewell to the heroic explorer we learned about in social studies.

You may have sailed the ocean blue in 1492, but right now, babe, almost 500 years after your legendary voyage, you are experiencing heavy weather.

Discovery ain’t what it used to be, El Capitan. In fact, the government of Spain may be the only institution in the world that see your quincentenary as the occasion for unalloyed rejoicing.

For scholars throughout the world, the anniversary is a time for serious reevaluation of Columbus and his contribution to history. And for descendants of the native people who watched Columbus arrive in this brave new world, it is a time for protest, if not for mourning.

Indeed, it can be risky in some circles to even breathe the word “discovery” these days. And so the title of a provocative exhibit that opens Saturday at SPARC, the Social and Public Art Resource Center, in Venice, has been chosen carefully: “Encuentro.”

“Encuentro” is Spanish for encounter, but the real theme of this exhibit of 21 works by Chicano and American Indian artists is in its subtitle: “Invasion of the Americas and the Making of the Mestizo.”

As Marietta Bernstorff, curator of SPARC, explains, this show was born out of a collision of cultures that began 499 years ago and continues to this day. Some of the work deals explicitly with the destruction of indigenous people and their traditions by the European invaders. Artist Aida Mancillas, for instance, tells in words and visual images of how a 16th-Century bishop destroyed the last books of the Mayans--and later, tormented by guilt, spent the rest of his life trying to reconstruct what was lost.

But the condition of being mestizo, of mixed blood, is also central to the show. The blending of cultures is reflected in such hybrid icons as Cesar Martinez’s “Mona Lupe: The Epitome of Chicano Art,” which combines the enigmatic smile of the super-European Mona Lisa with the starry blue costume of the ultra-mestizo Virgin of Guadalupe.

Bernstorff, 32, has a personal interest in the mestizo experience as well as a professional one. She was born in Mexico of a Mexican mother and a German father and raised in Mississippi.

Inviting artists of native blood to reflect on Columbus could have been an invitation to do humorless, polemical work. But, as Bernstorff points out, the pieces are often surprisingly funny, such as Richard Ray Whitman’s “Do Indian Artists Go to Santa Fe When They Die?”

“There’s a little fun with a little bit of pain,” says Bernstorff. Often there is a great deal of pain made bearable by gallows humor. That is the case with “Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbia World” by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Smith is a member of the Flathead tribe, and her post-encounter paper dolls include Ken and Barbie Plenty Horses. That would be pretty funny--that is pretty funny--except the costumes provided for them (complete with tabs for attaching the garments) include father and son “smallpox” suits, alluding to the U.S. government’s distribution of disease-infested blankets among the Montana Indians.

Bernstorff speculates that humor is so prevalent because it is one of the strategies the artists have discovered for dealing with the inevitable strain of being minority or mixed-blood people.

According to Bernstorff, there is a major divergence in the show between the American Indian work and that of the Chicano artists. That split is reflected in the very words the artists use to describe the turbulent encuentro with the Old World.

“The Native American artists took a very strong stance, calling it an invasion,” she says. “The Chicano artists responded very differently. For them it was more of an encounter.” Chicano indignation at the European intrusion is often tempered by the fact that they are a blended people, she says.

To illustrate, Bernstorff points to the work of Santa Barraza. Painting on tin in a traditional Mexican format called retablo, Santa Barraza includes a portrait of Malinche, the native woman who served as translator for Hernando Cortes, conqueror of Mexico, and bore him a child. Malinche is widely regarded as a traitor among contemporary Mexicans and Chicanos, but she is also the mother of the first mestizo. Santa Barraza shows Malinche as a heroic figure with a tiny red-headed baby lovingly pressed to her breast.

In the catalogue to the show, Chicana artist Mancillas talks about the need for a post-Columbian solution to traditional racial tensions. Today’s New World “can mean a new sense of ourselves as both unique and belonging to a family of humankind,” she writes. “I see this new face in the face of my son and in millions of children like him. Anglo and Chicano, Cambodian, and Black, Korean and Jew, Vietnamese and Native American, Filipino and Irish, Jamaican and Chinese. These children are the new mestizos. I pin my hopes on them.”

Another major difference between the Indian and Chicano work, Bernstorff says, is distinctive religious imagery. The earth, the sky and animals important to Indian mythology dominate the work of artists such as Kathryn Stewart, a member of the Crow tribe. The traditional iconography of the Roman Catholic Church as it developed in Mexico plays a major role in the Chicano work.

Not that the Chicano pieces are steeped in orthodoxy. These are artists, not apologists. Bernstorff says she has no doubt that some people will be offended by Alfred J. Quiroz’s painting, “El Encomendero,” which features a rapacious monk and the severed hands of Mexican Indians. “His work always drives people crazy,” she observes, obviously comfortable with art that piques as well as pleases.

“Mona Lupe” may also be troublesome for some viewers, Bernstorff predicts. “The ‘Mona Lupe’ could never be shown in Mexico City. No way. I wouldn’t even take it there.” Bernstorff explains that many Mexicans venerate the Virgin of Guadalupe so passionately that a Mexican curator was fired recently for putting together a show that featured variations on the traditional depiction of the Virgin.

The SPARC show received a grant of $10,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation as part of its support of the Artes de Mexico program. It is the first exhibit to be held in the center’s newly remodeled gallery space at 685 Venice Blvd.--a former jail complete with freshly painted holding cells. The show opens Saturday night with a public reception from 5 to 7 p.m. and continues through Dec. 21.