Art-seekers headed to the modest-scaled yet invigorating exhibition Accretion: Works by Latin American Women at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art won’t have much trouble knowing they have arrived in the right gallery. Entering the Preston Morton Gallery, we are boldly greeted by a temporary wall bearing the exhibition title against an electric Kool-Aid hue of hot pink married to coral.
In a sense, the optical welcoming splash sensation preps us for a selection of art, varied in nature, media, and locale within Latin American, which can be vivid in terms of both color palette and underlying themes. While the work wins our attention through purely sensory means, this is one show in which wall texts matter, conveying themes of alienation, social ostracism and oppression, cultural identity searching, and other concepts pertinent to the Latin American experience in the United States.
On the opposite side of the welcoming wall, aptly enough, is the effervescently florid — in a good way — painting “Lavinia Mariposa,” Patricia Iglesias Peco’s painterly interpretation of the Uruguayan novel Reina Amelia by Marosa di Giorgio. Its protagonist is transformed into a garden-tending butterfly, a magic realist idea folded into visual forms and spirits on canvas.
In another form-exploding painting, Ilana Savdie’s “Lágrimas y mocos (exploiting a suitable host)” unleashes the vision of a large, mutant image hybrid of abstraction and fragmented figuration, an element referring to a Carnival-esque monkey-elephant Marimonda character from Colombia. Savdie writes that she savors the ability, as an artist, to “fashion my own gods out of my entrails.” Entrails, it turns out, are also evoked in the painting.
Realism rears its head in various ways throughout the show. Deanna Barahona’s “Tia Sonia” combines a black-and-white photo of her Guatemalan aunt from the 1990s — in a “glamour shot” — with a bright-colored tiled background, more common in Latin America than the drabber public spaces in the U.S.
A seeking out of cultural — or multicultural — identity is evident in Evelyn Quijas Godinez’s “Equis (X),” a ceramic and concrete relief sculpture depicting the pyramid Teotihuacan, but jutting out from the wall and layered with personal modern touches. Her piece reflects the idea of tracing a continuum from Mayan antiquity through her present life as a Mexican-American.
Adjacent to this upended pyramid, and related to its field of personal and earthen inquiry, is Jackie Amézquita’s “Oro Negro (Black Gold),” with nine rectilinear panels reflecting her neighborhood in Los Angeles with potentially endangered and irradiated soil sourced from her environment.
Working conditions amongst migrants perhaps inevitably finds its way into the show’s thematic mix. Jay Lynn Gomez’s subtle chiaroscuro study, “Nightsweeper,” is an acrylic-on-cardboard image of a worker in the wee hours, silhouetted against the glare of swanky storefronts. The cardboard aspect is a humble material relating to the Chicano/a tradition of rasquachismo — using available resources to get the artistic expressive job done.
Another touching work-related piece is Estefania Ajcip’s “Ja-K’iche’” (“ja” translating to “home” in the Mayan K’iche’ tongue). A mixed-media piece involving fabric, acrylic, and a wood frame, the scene depicts the artist’s Guatemalan father hard at work at a sewing machine — presumably in an L.A. sweatshop — earning money to send back to his family. The artist, who did move to L.A., is depicted as a little girl, imagining the remote life of her migrant father up north.
One of the show-stoppers in the gallery, three-dimensional division, is Isabel Barbuzza’s “Re-Designing My Library,” a dress rack functioning as feminist commentary, with deconstructed books regarding women, and kimonos made from pages out of a classic art historical textbook, HW Janson’s History of Art. Infamously, Janson’s tome contributes to the male-ification of art history, as a compendium of fine art history as “his” story, skimping on the input of women artists.
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Photography, albeit referential to painting tradition, has its moment in the show, as well. Carlee Fernandez’s gorgeous and provocative “Hues from Brown to Pink” is a mother and child photograph, with its subjects dramatically atilt on a stump and elegantly posed and warmly highlighted against a black background. As is pointed out in the wall text (again, take note: some reading required here), the image makes an associational leap across art historical epochs, to the Baroque portrait of St. Stephen, also leaping from Latin American to “old European” orthodoxy.
A similar geo-cultural switch occurs in Harmonia Rosales’s painting “Oshosi Gets His Crown,” a portrait of the Yoruba deity and hunter character in a scenario with his trusty hound and his dead mother, apparently succumbing to her own son’s arrow. The mythological scene taps into African lore, rather than the European and Greco-Roman models of what we learned in, say, Janson’s History of Art.
Accretions may be disguised as a modest exhibition in a smaller side gallery at SBMA, but it contains much to look at and think about and through which to reconsider art-world-ly assumptions. There’s much more to it than a vibrant palette, especially once we know the underscoring and driving concepts beneath the surfaces.
Accretion: Works by Latin American Women is on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1130 State St.) through April 13, 2025. See sbma.net.
