Independent Spirit Lives On in ‘Majas’ : The show at the Otis Art Gallery wobbles a bit in accomplishment, but the works are refreshing in their refusal to follow old ways of considering modern Mexican art.

By planting the visage of the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera smack in the middle of the forehead of a ceramic likeness of cartoon vamp Betty Boop, Consuelo Castaneda’s 1993 color photograph “Betty/Kahlo” manages a hilarious, double-edged send-up of a famous self-portrait by Rivera’s wife, painter Frida Kahlo.

Kahlo’s current status as a larger-than-life cultural icon within the pantheon of modern Mexican artists is given a wry, feminist reading by Castaneda: A caricature of a perpetually imperiled but indefatigable damsel is imprinted with the face of a powerful male artist. Like Frida, Betty has Diego on her mind. But his likeness is strong and sturdy while hers is a cartoon.

The fact that the Betty Boop cartoon is American in origin further complicates the picture. Frida’s cult was manufactured in the United States, in the wake of American feminism. Her liberation from the shadow of her husband has been important, but the ensuing cultishness has also fixed her image into something of a prison for younger Mexican female artists. Oppressiveness lingers, in a different form.

Castaneda’s pungent photograph is one of 19 works in “Las Nuevas Majas,” a show currently on view at the Otis Art Gallery. Its complex consideration of both Mexican and American traditions of modern and contemporary culture is instructive, as is its knowledge of the always slippery nature of stereotypes.

If the overall level of artistic accomplishment in the show is somewhat wobbly, it is nonetheless significant for its refusal to knuckle under to habitual ways of considering contemporary Mexican art. It’s refreshing in its independent-mindedness.

I suppose Lorena Wolffer’s one, big, unstretched, blood-soaked canvas could loosely be called a painting, but the show is otherwise limited to sculpture, photography, video and mixed-media work by 11 artists based in Mexico City. Because few of them have shown before in Los Angeles, and because each is represented by just one or two works, it’s not possible to get a developed handle on any one of them. Still, “Las Nuevas Majas” is among the more cleverly effective exhibitions of contemporary art to have been mounted of late.

Guest curator Maria Guerra deftly busts up a variety of complacent expectations. One is simply her focus on artists who are women. For when it comes to sexism, the Mexican art world is certainly no more progressively enlightened than its counterparts in the United States and Europe.

Some of these artists are concerned with specifically feminist issues, approaches or traditions. In addition to Castaneda, Ana Casas Broda uses photographs to record generational bonds and shifts among women, presumably within families, while Wolffer’s cluster of dresses for little girls, each one soaked in blood, evokes the trauma of ritual passage.

Silvia Gruner’s three-panel folding screen, “The Expulsion From Paradise,” creates a gridded modesty screen (the kind you might undress behind), carefully embroidered with a biblical narrative of the fall from grace at the inquisitive hands of Eve. Gabriela Lopez Portillo has crocheted a fragile dress from her own hair--fetishistic clothing beautiful in its fragility, but finally nonfunctional.

Most, however, are not specifically feminist. Sofia Taboas’ 20-foot-long garland made from artificial lemons and capsules of vitamin E strung together with cord is a funny talisman of modern medicinal faith. Nearby, Yolanda Gutierrez has laid out on the floor a ritual “garden” of ash and bones.

Among the most compelling pieces is Melanie Smith’s “Orange Lush,” an 8-foot-tall panel standing out from the wall and covered at random with a scavenged array of unrelated, mostly plastic flotsam: earrings, toy duck-bills, balloons, safety vests, inexplicable baubles and other stuff. The only thing that unites the diversity is the accident of their common color. Everything is bright orange.

As it turns out, this works pretty well as a metaphor for the exhibition itself. These 11 artists are all women, but it would be a mistake to attempt to glean some particular, artistic sameness among them, simply because of that arbitrary distinction. No “woman’s aesthetic” is being curatorially proposed, nor does one inadvertently emerge. The show is smartly designed to undermine such restrictive or programmatic characterizations.

In a similar spirit, and perhaps even more pointedly, neither does “Las Nuevas Majas” offer any sort of nationalistic vision for a contemporary Mexican art. For much of the 19th and 20th Centuries the idea of developing a uniquely national aesthetic was important to many of the most prominent Mexican artists. Perhaps because of the identification of this nationalism with patriarchal culture, Guerra seems intent on letting that heroic stance slide happily into the mists of history.

This anti-nationalistic (or, at least, un-nationalistic) point of view is also reflected in the choice of specific artists. Four of the 11, who range in age from 23 to 36, were born in Cuba, Spain or England, the rest were born in Mexico. The visual language in which their art speaks is emphatically international.

Their art is inevitably informed by the social circumstances of the locale in which they currently live, and the artists don’t necessarily avoid the great, variegated traditions of Mexican culture in their work. But Mexico City, a cosmopolis of staggering proportions, has long been internationalist in bearing. Like every modern city, it is a city of immigrants; the show reflects that.

As exhibitions go, “Las Nuevas Majas” is a smallish undertaking--there is no catalogue--while most of the work seems proficient, if only occasionally exceptional. It began life in 1992 as a show prepared for a once-lively, now rather moribund nonprofit space off Mexico City’s Alameda Park; the new version, assembled specifically for Otis, is considerably stronger.

However, it’s especially notable for another reason altogether: “Las Nuevas Majas” is an example of contemporary artistic exchange between Los Angeles and Mexico City. By this time one might expect that particular international dialogue to be a perfectly common, well-developed state of affairs. In fact, it almost never happens.

* Otis Art Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 2401 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 251-0555, through Aug. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.