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WASH. STAR
28 Aug 77
David Tannous

The difficulties are compounded, though, for the artist who comes from another background to deal with mainstream Western art. Should he introduce elements of his own artistic heritage into his work, or should he try to exclude them? Once brought in, how should (or can) they relate to the often alien attributes and assumptions of the mainstream? As arch quotations? Satirical commentary? Colorful bits of exotic window-dressing?

What of the people looking at this hyphenated art - knowing who made it, will they see "influences" that don't exist? Or, conversely, will they be able to discern cross-cultural references actually present, but which the artist doesn't imagine (or admit) are there?

This barrage of questions and possibilities (by no means exhaustive list) applies in differing ways to three shows currently in town: "Roots and Vision" (Hispanic-American art) at the National Collection of Fine Arts; "Indian Artists, 1977" (American Indian art) at the Via Gambaro Gallery; and "Seven Contemporary Iranian Artists" at the new Haden-Zand Gallery.

THE FIRST TWO exhibitions are expressly concerned with American artists who have ties to strongly-defined (and artistically rich) native sub-cultures. The third show deals with artists whose native traditions have little in common with those Western (and specifically American) conventions they now use in their art.

"Roots and Visions" is the most accessible and in many respects the most appealing of the three. In part this is due to the generally high level of the work (an eclectic mix of 48 recent pieces - paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints and photographs - by some 40 artists), but the accessibility (and the appeal) also derives from the familiarity of the Spanish idiom. Both its folkloric and high art forms to a certain extent have entered (and altered) the American mainstream, and the "strangeness" of the images here isn't as astonishing as we might expect.

This isn't to say there aren't some pretty strange things in the show. The two small exhibition rooms (almost too small to hold everything) are jammed full of such oddities as an elaborately enshrined toiled and a painted lesson in "Kitchen Spanish" that does include the kitchen sink. And if you look at it all quickly, you can pick up some of the expected stereotypes of "Spanish" art: yes, a lot of it is colorful, symmetrical, decorative and iconic; there's a lot of rough carved wood, a lot of religious references, and an awful lot of brooding about pain, torture and death.

But this work is neither innocent or naive: the cliches (visual and verbal) and are turned inside out with a fierce energy - sometimes to a funny effect, and at other times to a rather savage one. Most of the thrusts are directed at the collision of the two worlds of the Hispanic-American, and, contrary to expectations, it isn't always the Anglos who get it in the neck. Thus Amado Pena's "Chicano Gothic," a handsome richly-colored silkscreen, functions both as an artistic in-joke and as a bitter characterization of bottom-rung barrio life.

In Louis Leroy's free-standing assemblage "My Grandmother's Dresser Top," the barbs are thrown at mindless religiosity: a frieze of ceramic bleeding-Jesus heads wittily (and improbably) congregated with a tree stump, some bird wings and a few plaster saints. The sting is somewhat softened (but the joke remains) in "Cuauhtemoc," an eye-popping five-part mixed-media costume/wall-piece by Rogelio Ruiz Valdovin that out-Maya's the Mayas in a preposterous be-feathered splendor of leopard skins and (anachronistic) peacock plumes, more suitable for a Ziegfeld showgirl than for any pre-Columbian prince.

Beyond the jokes, though, the art is (by and large) strikingly effective purely on artistic terms. This is something of a bonus, because the work for the exhibition (as its title indicates) was deliberately chosen to reflect the artists' concern with their origins and "separateness." That looked-for self-consciousness certainly is very much in evidence, but most of the artists are artists first, and polemicists second. The message gets across, yet it doesn't get in the way. The show continues at the N.C.F.A. (8th and G Sts. NW) through October 2.

THE EXHIBITION OF eight contemporary American Indian artists at the Via Gambaro Gallery (416 11th St. SE) also is designed to discredit myths and challenge cliches, but the results are much more uneven, as is the quality of work. With two exceptions, the artists are young (most in their early to mid-thirties), and clearly they are anxious to dispel the vacation-souvenir concepts of Indian art. Unhappily, they sometimes run too far the other way, and exchanging one kind of