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

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, March 27, 2006

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."

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.