Clay Ceiling

From Pre-Columbian Mexico and Peru, Women of the World, and the Ones Who Rose Above It

At the National Museum of Women in the Arts, a clay Zapotec figure from A.D. 200-900. (Museo Nacional de Antropologia)

The mothers and the lovers, the beauties and the hags encountered in the archaeological exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts are power figures mostly -- assurers of fecundity, servants of the spirit world, devourers of flesh. The show that they inhabit is both civilized and savage.

What's startling about "Divine and Human: Women in Ancient Mexico and Peru," though, is not its visual force. That we are accustomed to. What's startling is where it is.

Elsewhere, this would be another show of pre-Columbian art. At the National Museum of Women in the Arts, it is a revolution, a breaking of the rules, an opening of the door.

Never in the past has that institution shown so much art by men.

"It was a well-considered decision," Director Judy L. Larson says.

What makes it a major move is that the art in "Divine and Human" isn't entirely, or perhaps even largely, by women. It's about them.

When the museum opened in 1987, it was fueled by a conviction -- that women ought to have an art museum of their own.

In other art museums, the patriarchy governed. Males got the shows, and males got the breaks. Women, for too long, had been shoved into the shadows, excluded from the textbooks, thwarted and disdained. The new museum would correct this. To the oft-asked question "Where are all the women artists?" it would answer with the evidence: Here they are at last.

Many were the women who rallied to the cause. True, they did so rather gently. The activists who built the place went for sisterhood and tolerance and mutual support. They didn't raise the shaking fist. They were more genteel than that.

Eliane Karp de Toledo and Marta Sahagun de Fox conceived "Divine and Human." Laura Bush has signed on as its honorary patron. These women are, respectively, the first ladies of Peru, Mexico and the United States, though the show they have brought us isn't ladylike at all.

The women it depicts -- some are human beings, some goddesses, it's often hard to tell -- are unashamedly physical. They do not hide their genitals. They bleed. Their piety is obvious, but also pretty scary. Ritual human sacrifice was not at all uncommon in ancient Mexico and Peru. They're also frankly carnal, assuming physical positions of Kama Sutra variety. In childbirth they writhe and strain as the baby's head emerges. They also laugh with joy, and play happily with their puppies (though, perhaps, they ate them, too).

In her foreword to the catalogue, Mrs. Bush accentuates the positive. She writes: "The stories that [these objects] tell of women's strengths, exercised through their roles as mothers, healers, governors, priestesses and goddesses, are fascinating and inspirational."