BY THIS TIME, WomanKraft is a venerable
institution, a
21-year-old downtown presence dedicated to promoting women in
the arts. If the non-profit gallery, founded in 1974, teeters
on the soft-and-squishy goddess-crafts-spirituality end of feminism,
its directors have also shrewdly invested in the hard materials
of bricks and mortar.
A couple years back, after putting years of sweat equity into its high-profile rental space at the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and Congress Street, the organization was evicted. The directors had no interest in going down the sweat equity rabbit hole again--pouring their own money and labor into a place that the owners could then offer at higher rents to somebody more palatable. They decided to go for "artists' equity" instead and actually acquire an Arts District property. WomanKraft, led by administrative director Linn Lane and exhibitions director Gayle Swanbeck, scraped together the money to buy a decrepit Queen Anne building on South Stone Avenue, a former showplace reduced to an unofficial flophouse.
The ramshackle place was painstakingly renovated by WomanKraft
members, friends and assorted volunteers. Nicknamed The Castle
because of its turret, two years ago the building was filled with
debris, blighted by disintegrating plaster walls and unmistakeably
tainted by the scent of stale urine. Today, odor-free, it boasts
a lovely gallery complete with hardwood floors and bay window,
a shop, rental artists' studios, a guest suite for visiting artists,
and a spruced-up yard. No longer on the regular route of Congress
Street art searchers, WomanKraft suffers a bit from its out-of-the-way
location. But in addition to its regular round of classes for
adults and children, small press publishing and services offered
to member artists, WomanKraft mounts a regular schedule of art
shows.
The current exhibition, Nahuila, is a one-person show of works in pastel and acrylic, on paper, canvas, leather, wood and tin by Mexican artist Santa Sandra Robles. An employee of the Mexican consulate up the street from WomanKraft, Robles does art in her spare time. Unfortunately, her show is a good demonstration of some of the reservations I have about WomanKraft's aesthetic standards, despite all its good community works.
Nahuila is a mixture of the good, the bad and the insipid. The title, according to the press release, "means place of roots and is about two goddesses, one of water, one of earth." Not an encouraging sign. The show is also about Holy Week celebrations undertaken by "the Mayan Indians of Sinaloa," the Mexican state Robles hails from.
It's hard to find much evidence of either of these themes in this large show, but it does open encouragingly with an interesting installation in the small entry room of the gallery. Robles has draped all four walls with gigantic pastel drawings on brown paper. These vigorous line drawings, outlined in black, have some of the vigor of cave art. The stylized animals, filled in with rich shades of brown, red and rust, cavort across the space. Sketched Mayan masks are lined up across the top of one wall. A rough wooden cross, painted in white and geometric designs, leans out toward the floor. The little room adds up to an energetic look at the melded cultural styles of Mexico.
Robles draws a lot of inspiration from Mexican ancestors. A long paper banner in the main gallery gives a nice take on the elaborate carvings of a Mayan stela, with a sure-handed pastel drawing in earth colors. But her renditions of the beloved Mexican retablo are sentimental failures. Robles has done a whole series of painted angels decorated with punched tin and framed in by rough wood. She's got the materials right but she's way off her mark in the mood. Mexican religious art can be austere or fanciful but it unerringly evokes either profound religious faith or profound religious fear. Robles' angels do not inspire awe. Instead, they are simpering pretty ladies who vary from each other only in the direction they turn their lovely eyes and pouty mouths.
It's a mystery to me why a serious artist would put these pieces of merchandise (they've been selling briskly) into an exhibition along with works that show real promise. Instead of emptying out the studio, Robles should have edited herself and put together a smaller, more coherent show. She should have left out the weak acrylic paintings, such as "Ceremonial Maya" and "Dos Angeles," sent the angels off to a gift shop and concentrated instead on her bold, stylized animals and evocative installations.
WomanKraft abandons curatorial responsibility by going along with the show in its entirety. The group has the laudable goal of encouraging artists who don't get much exposure or encouragement elsewhere. But they do a disservice to their own artists when they don't adhere to rigorous artistic standards. By assigning the same value--and equal exhibition space--to works of widely varying quality, they inadvertently devalue works of real merit.
