SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Looking South : Three art shows offer a sampler of Latin American inspiration and traditions.

This fall, the Southern California art scene has gotten a strong dose of medicine, which has challenged the art world’s somewhat ethnocentric consideration of art from the “other” Americas to the south.

The exhibits in Los Angeles under the umbrella project “Mexico: Thirty Centuries Later” assert Mexico’s ancient and yet continuous cultural heritage with a force that’s hard to ignore.

Select Mexican artists--Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo and now certainly Frida Kahlo--are generally deemed worthy of serious art-historical attention. But the bulk of artistic activity from south of the border is too often relegated to the fringes, somehow left just outside the border of the “western” art Establishment.

Ventura County has had its share of Latin American inspiration, beginning with the powerful show of work by Mexican women photographers at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art last spring. Currently, three shows offer a composite sampling of American traditions outside of the “west.”

At the Momentum Gallery, Cuban-born Seattle resident Juan Alonso deftly balances the objective and subjective view of his homeland’s traditions. A generous collection of works by several Mexican artists at the Carnegie Art Museum expands on the conventional understanding of prominent Mexican artists of our century. And the artists dealing with El Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) at the Frances Puccinelli Gallery in Carpinteria mix bone studies and graveyard humor.

Alonso’s vibrant works, many flecked with either a quasi-tropical or quasi-primal quality, belie the nature of his background. After fleeing his native Cuba at the age of 9 during the country’s revolution, Alonso spent formative years in the Cuban settlements in Miami. Like the Omar de Leon paintings now up at Art City II (de Leon is a displaced Nicaraguan living in Camarillo), Alonso views home from afar--in more than just the geographical sense.

It’s hard not to see in these works the complex outlook of a displaced native, at once grounded in his native culture and also informed by stateside stereotypes of that culture. The essence of Caribbean carnivalia comes through. But also an ironic contemporary sensibility as he dips in and out of the rough-hewn draftsmanship and bold thematic simplicity of folk art. But he’s not jes’ folk.

The loud and rhythmic works dominating the gallery consist of bright colors in acrylic on unmounted canvas and decorated with sequins. Mostly the images are of dancers and conga drummers whose wriggling sensual energies are harnessed, visually, by the staunchly geometric grid pattern of the parquet dance floor.

“At the Tropicana” features a suave character dancing, cigarette in hand and a shifty glance in the eye, but the composition is uneasily compressed by large-leafed plants creeping in from the sides.

Flat planes of color are offset by the sparkle and the tactility of the sequins, while skin is black, detailed with yellow lines. The paintings look like festive banners or flags, but the closer you look, the more it’s apparent that there is more than meets the eye.

In the back room are more painterly works by Alonso, including several facial portraits that seem to combine the influences of Jean Dubuffet and primitive portraiture. His Madonna and child, eyes aflame and bedecked in sequins and flurries of gold paint, have no time for western politeness.

For a more historical view, proceed to the Carnegie in Oxnard, where the fine “Prophets of Mexican Art” show sheds new light on a few nooks and crannies of the tradition there. Stellar names may help to lure audiences to the museum. Rivera and Siqueiros are represented by small intimate works in counterpoint to the grandeur and site-specificity of their mural work. The upstairs gallery is mostly devoted to the prints of Tamayo, who died this year. His mixograph technique emulates the rough surfaces of a painting.

Really, though, the stronger interest of the show lies beside the art stars. For historical intrigue, the star of the show is Jose Guadalupe (1852-1913), whose illustrations for “penny press” broadsheets showed great graphic style and parodistic flair. “El Mosquito Americano” depicts the stateside pests--political, economic and other types of bloodsuckers--raiding the natives.

Alfredo Ramos Martinez is represented by paintings done on actual newsprint, now yellowed and offering a sure-fire time-stamp and a layer of “found art” canniness in the very fabric of the work.

The showstopper, though, is Jose Luis Cuevas, whose swarthy drawings are tucked into a back room. His dark, bulbous, fuzzy figures belong in some personal dream world that is both tender and foreboding. One nude encounter on a couch alludes to a thwarted sexual episode. Another work, marked with the words “Mireya was my first private model,” suggests a close first carnal encounter.

The pained tenderness and naivete flecked with dread in Cuevas’ work is strangely affecting, and it makes one wonder just how many other relative unknowns are wallowing in neglect because of the art world’s border problem.

On a more “deadly” though lighter note, the richly entertaining Day of the Dead art at the Frances Puccinelli Gallery features skeletons by the score. The visitor is welcomed by a garishly colored altar on the stairwell and is ushered into a world of often comically depicted deathly subjects in two and three dimensions.

Linda Benet depicts bony models in a kind of expressionistic painting style, while Augustin Galicia and Eric Davison prop them up in convertibles and model them as deejays in papier-mache splendor. Nell Campbell’s affectionate photographs capture the actual Dia de los Muertos celebrations in Mexico.

And then there are Alfred Ramirez’s wacky views of skeletons embroiled in fleshy human activities--one as a couch potato, another playing golf, a third playing pool. In “Death Do Us Part,” a married couple walk over the threshold and straight into a freshly dug grave. In his statement, Ramirez says: “. . . death will remain a mystery, but a good laugh will always serve to quiet our fears.”

As you leave the gallery, you notice the Christian Science Reading Room on the ground floor of the building. A placard in the window reads: “The subject of this week’s lesson sermon: probation after death.” At this time of year, we tend to prefer the lighter side of the topic. Death takes a holiday.

* WHERE AND WHEN

Juan Alonso at the Momentum Gallery, 34 N. Palm St. in Ventura, through Dec. 6.

“Prophets of Mexican Art,” drawings, watercolors and prints at the Carnegie Art Museum, 424 S. C St. in Oxnard through Nov. 24.

“El Dia de los Muertos,” group show at the Frances Puccinelli Gallery, 888 Linden Ave., second floor, in Carpinteria, through Saturday.