Exhibit celebrates Latinos' struggle to preserve identity

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- ``The Cruelties Used by the Spaniards on the Indians" heralds a print that depicts natives bound and burned, shot with arrows, disemboweled. The print first appeared in a 17th-century English edition of the 1565 tome ``A Brief Chronicle of the Destruction of the Indies."

So begins the story of ``Voces y Visiones: Highlights From El Museo del Barrio's Permanent Collection," on exhibit at the Currier Museum of Art through June 26. The show offers more than 100 Puerto Rican, Caribbean, Latin American, and Latino artworks from New York's Barrio museum.

The earliest pieces -- clay bowls, a ceremonial stone ax , an amulet and collar -- are relics from the Taíno people who dominated Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, and the Bahamas from roughly 1200 until Christopher Columbus showed up in October 1492.

But most of the works in the show are from the last 150 years. And though many are jubilant, just as often they speak of the struggles of indigenous peoples, slaves kidnapped from Africa, and their descendants to maintain their identities and traditions in the face of trials.

Here are saints -- Catholic saints the Spanish colonists impressed upon native peoples, whom they prayed to for hope and comfort at their home altars. Tiny figures balance atop the wooden fingers of Norberto Cedeño's rough-hewn ``All Powerful Hand of God" (1950), vulnerable before the vast forces of the universe.

The master 19th-century Mexican engraver José Guadalupe Posada's graveyard humor is evident in prints of a grinning skeleton guitarist and skeleton police officer. The multi-artist portfolio ``Prints of the Mexican Revolution" (1947) depicts soldiers riding boxcars off to fight for the reform of Mexico's feudal farming system, family members firing rifles through the broken windows of a tony apartment, the revolutionary leader Zapata astride a rearing steed, and later Zapata, surrounded by rifles, dead and bloody on the ground.

Some of the best pieces date from the 1980s. Skeleton trumpeters and drummers sit in the blooming purple branches of a ceramic Mexican ``Tree of Life Candelabra." A demon with snake arms and legs stares out of Haitian Antoine Oleyant's beaded and sequined voodoo banner. Puerto Rican New Yorker Gregorio Marzán, who took up sculpture after retiring from a toy factory, presents a charmingly goofy 3 1/2-foot-tall giraffe striped with sequins. The fire of the political prints and the verve and humor of these folk artworks show the ``fine art" here -- cool abstractions, Pop Art appropriations, conceptual amalgamations -- to be stuffy and square.

Pepón Osorio, a major figure in contemporary Latino art, stabs at combining the conceptual ambition of fine art with the magpie folk aesthetic in ``La Cama (The Bed)" (1987). He encrusts a four-poster bed with a rubber snake, toy doves, Ken dolls, rhinestones, plastic princesses. Souvenir ribbons from baby showers and weddings decorate the lacy spread. Images of saints cover the pillows. It should seem crazy and alive, but remains mostly inert, perhaps because Osorio's hints toward his personal history -- something about his fiancee and his childhood nanny -- are confusing.

Many of the recent works are by Latino immigrants to the United States (like Osorio) or their children and reflect the mix of promise and struggle they found here. A 1974 portfolio by Roger Cabán, Charles Biasiny Rivera, and Felipe Dante documents the New York Puerto Rican experience. In it men stoop over, picking cauliflower at a farm; young girls dressed in lacy white gowns sit in row upon row of chairs at a public elementary school function, their proud parents lining the back of the drab hall; a hipster teen couple embraces in a high school cafeteria.

The photos speak of the hopes of immigrant families making a go of it in New York, parents striving for better lives for themselves and their children. They speak of traditions passed from one generation to the next, and how the children reinvent the old ways as they assimilate into America.

Voces y Visiones: Highlights From El Museo del Barrio’s Permanent Collection
At: the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, N.H., through June 26. 603-669-6144, www.currier.org.