Clay Ceiling

They're are also pretty harrowing. Pain of many kinds is evoked in this show. "Scarification and tattooing, cranial deformation, dental mutilation, and the piercing of ears and lips," as the catalogue observes, are frequently depicted. So is heavy work, the grinding of the corn, the lugging of the water jug, the endless labor at the loom.

Death is ever-present. Two object-laden women's tombs -- one discovered in Zapotal, Mexico, in 1971; the other unearthed 20 years later in San Jose de Moro, Peru -- are also on display.

Dark though such sights might be, here the darkness isn't constant. Every now and then this sprawling show delivers stabs of shining beauty so sudden and familiar that the viewer seems to feel the centuries dissolve. The healthy, youthful loveliness of a little head from Veracruz that was made 1,000 years ago jolts you when you see it the way a passing beauty might stop you on the street. A little shawl-wrapped figure (a small ceramic bottle by the Moche people of Peru) sits cross-legged and abstracted like a distillate of patience. We sense these women's lives, and we're shown the foods they eat (the peanuts and the yams, the plantains and potatoes), but what is more impressive is the way these glimpses slide off into the realms of the witches and the oracles, the spirits and the gods.

What is everywhere apparent here, and too often forgotten, is that women seen in art are seldom merely women. They're metaphors as well. The spirit of the feminine, often much abstracted, is a constant in world art. The strongest of these figures personify the complicated powers -- of the serpent and the jaguar, of fertility and water, of the seasons and the moon -- that organize the world.

Here's a statuette from Veracruz standing with her arms outstretched. The dark spots on her headdress are said to represent the jaguar. We see her in the act of offering its powers as if giving us a blessing.

An Aztec figure nearby was surely meant to terrify. Her name is Cihuateotl. She represents the spirit of a woman who died in childbirth. Now she haunts the crossroads eager to devour the living human child of which she was deprived. Her stone face is a skull's face. Her clawlike hands and lipless grin make clear her intentions. You wouldn't want to meet her on the roadside at night.

Did a man or woman carve her? Who knows? Does it matter to the viewer? Perhaps a little, but not much.

This long has been the problem with the Women's Museum. Nineteen years ago it was founded with high hopes -- "to redefine traditional histories of art" -- but the long-neglected women it hoped to rediscover have proved pretty hard to find. The frequent thinness of its shows has not been inexplicable. By insisting that what matters is the gender of the artist, not the gender of the object, the museum has denied itself, inevitably, vast chunks of world art.

"Divine and Human" proposes an alternative. Take womanhood as a subject and examine it intensely, and do so open-mindedly to see what grand exhibits might be found along that road.

This is not a perfect show. Its scholarship is slim, its accompanying catalogue is not much more than a pamphlet. But the works of art it offers, the ceramics in particular, are sometimes very fine, its range is very wide, and at least it is a start.

Divine and Human: Women in Ancient Mexico and Peru will remain on exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW, through May 28. Wal-Mart and Altria are the show's leading sponsors. Hunt Oil, Newmont Mining, Southern Peru Copper Corp., Abbott and Toyota also helped fund it. This is its only U.S. showing. The museum is open Monday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday noon-5 p.m. Admission $8.