Beyond Kahlo

Anyone who knows anything about famous Latina artists is familiar with the turbulent feminism, feverish sexuality, and inevitable tragedy that seem to dog their heels, in life and death. Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and Cuban-American sculptor/performance artist Ana Mendieta, for example, produced some of the sexiest and most confrontational pieces in the annals of art history -- unsurprisingly, given the inspiration gleaned from their own harried lives. Unfortunately, since reputations often precede artists, powerful archetypes give way to immovable stereotypes. Fortunately, the current exhibition at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, "Mujeres Visionarias (Visionary Women)," presents contemporary Latina artists as more than just earth mamas, femmes fatales, or troublemakers chained to the genre of magic realism.

MCCLA's 15th annual exhibition of Latina artists tips its brim to the Kahlos and Mendietas who paved the way, but also emphasizes contemporary women's impressions of a rapidly changing world in which cultural traditions collide in erratic ways.

Composed of sculptures, paintings, photography, and mixed media pieces, MCCLA's show is the largest annual exhibition in the United States dedicated to emerging and established Latina artists. Because a plethora of women from different religions, countries, continents, and classes are represented, the pieces avoid the easy pigeonholing that accompanies most "women of color" events. All the same, curator Patricia Rodriguez selected pieces that obliquely or explicitly remark on how modern-day Latinas navigate the contradictions that inform their worlds. The collected works describe the knotty nexus of personal identity, colonialism, and the body, ranging from polemic deconstructions of empire to sanguine visions of homegrown goddesses.

One of the 43 featured artists is Maria Sanchez, whose lush images convey the sensual interplay of food, music, language, and ritual. Sanchez's acrylic paintings are heavily textured, vibrant, and crudely rendered, capturing the whimsical nature of her folk art influences. El Rio Me Sustiene (The River Sustains Me), for example, shows a dress flapping in the wind over a river. It's a bucolic scene, at first glance, but the unspoken narrative (How did the dress get there? Whose dress is it anyway?) is both unsettling and familiar, a silent acknowledgment of the spaces where gender unconsciously perseveres.

Harder hitting pieces include Monica Martinez's Donde de Pagan las Penas (Where Sorrows Are Paid), a stern replica of a chair coated in aluminum spikes. Martinez's work is inspired by the aggressiveness and industry of Western culture and its intrusion into the pre-Hispanic world, which she associates with nature and long-lost tradition. The sculpture suggests torture, civil unrest, and a collision of worlds with violent and oppressive implications.

Like both Sanchez and Martinez, the other artists often weave traditional Latin art forms into their work. At the same time, the pieces contain inventive techniques and refuse exoticization. So cultural fetishists, be warned: This work speaks for itself.