ART REVIEW : Fowler’s ‘Santos de Palo’ Reveals Acts of Devotion : Spiritual hunger of Puerto Rican workers is the force behind the hand-carved pantheon of household saints.

“Santos de Palo: The Household Saints of Puerto Rico” at UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History should not be missed for the education it provides, the sheer affection it inspires, and the lie it gives to the cliche that all folk art looks alike.

Organized by Yvonne Lange for New York’s Museum of American Folk Art, it includes some 150 small treasures from the collection of Alan Moss Reveron.

This is the first traveling show ever devoted to the religious carvings of the island. At a scan, the santos seem to depict the most familiar of Catholic themes--the Nativity, three wise men, Blessed Virgin, Christ crucified. The works look quite a bit alike, but reading the slender catalogue reveals that their makers don’t give a hoot if they look alike because that’s not the point. The works are made as acts of devotion, not exercises in individuality.

Puerto Rico was discovered by Christopher Columbus on Nov. 19, 1493, on his second sally into the New World. Spain pretty well neglected the island until 1815 when she decided to squeeze profit out of the property. She prodded her own laborers to emigrate and imported African slaves to join the racially mixed indigenous population. The black workers wound up in sugar-growing areas along the coast; everybody else tended to work on the coffee plantations in the uplands. The islands were short on everything from schools to hospitals. To make matters worse, churches were few, badly staffed and hard to reach.

To make up for this, pious workers handy at whittling tried to reproduce images from church or religious prints so they could worship at home. They often turned their straight razors to the task. The santero is a frank copyist who unabashedly uses templates to guide his work. But he makes the templates.

Because the santos are not blessed, they need not conform to approved patterns. Originality seeped through this iconographical crack. Catholicism was privatized. This art was largely unknown until 1931 when Dominican friars recognized its expressive and aesthetic worth.

The Puerto Rican santero unwittingly followed the same cultural pattern as the rest of Colonial Spain. In trying to reproduce Catholic models, he inevitably mixed his native tradition and individual skills to produce a unique hybrid. Puerto Rican santos don’t, for example, look like those of the Hispanic Southwest. They lack the ferocity and preoccupation with death that links with the Mexican Day of the Dead and harks back to the blood rituals of the Aztec and Mayan civilizations.

There’s a sweetness and wistful poetry about the Puerto Rican work that is at once humbly respectful and intensely intimate in its little turns of interpretation. It’s attracted to pathetic subjects like “The Most Forsaken Soul in Purgatory.” It seems to thrive in the intimate format of the niche. In one such Cornell-like work, the santero waxes ebullient, lettering, “Viva Dios!” the way a revolutionary might shout, “Viva Zapata!”

If the santero thinks the Blessed Virgin looks nice in a red dress, she gets one--even if scarlet is a carnal color. Santeros have adopted distinctive versions of the Marian legend, such as one where a bull’s odd behavior uncovers a statue of the Virgin buried long ago to save her from profanation by invading Moors.

When a santero gets hold of a kitsch chromolithograph of “The All Powerful Hand of Christ,” he gives it magic. The Last Supper becomes less a moment of tragic drama and more a reverie on generosity with all the figures and all the trappings of the table carved with toy-like care and simplicity.

The Fowler folks have added a revealing touch to the show. It reproduces the bedroom of Ana Maria Pena, who was a traditional Puerto Rican spiritualist healer. There is a simple bentwood rocker, a wooden cross and a hand-made rag doll depicting a stereotypical robust black woman. Any multi-culturalist inclined to find this offensive should know that such dolls are made out of respect and believed to have healing powers.

Senora Pena’s spiritualist altar is also reproduced here. Such altars are kept in secluded parts of the house; the whole healers practice is confidential, if not secret. The altar is an ecumenical affair with a white cloth, purifying water and Catholic images, as well as a powerfully modeled head of a brown-skinned man and a red glass Buddha. Evidently, the more various the spiritual forces that aid the healer, the better.

A tableau is the work of Ysamur Flores-Pena, consulting curator for the exhibition and a UCLA folklorist. His contribution is educationally edifying. It’s also impossible to avoid noticing that it’s a lovely personal homage to his mom. That pretty well sums up the spirit of the show.

As in other spheres, mass production and mass migration are having their effect on Puerto Rico’s santeros. The kids are leaving for the mainland; production of cute plastic and plaster santos lessens demand. Already these acutely personal expressions of faith are turning into trinkets for tourists and aesthetic baubles for collectors.

* Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA; to April 10, closed Monday and Tuesday, (310) 825-4361.