ART; One Show Ponders a Cause and the Other Reviews a Heritage
THE Lehman College Art Gallery is divided into neat halves, and for the current exhibition the separation is specifically useful. Each half contains an elaborate installation, which is markedly different in temperament and rhythm from the other. ''Till Death Do Us Part'' by Anaida Hernandez is fraught with urgency, while ''A Town Portrait'' by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons is a remembrance of things past.
Ms. Hernandez, who is from Puerto Rico, was moved to make her work by threatened changes to a 1990 law in her country, which made domestic violence a crime. In an interview with the gallery director, Susan Hoeltzel, Ms. Hernandez said many politicians had been accused under the law. With the help of a journalist who gained access to police records, Ms. Hernandez found the names, ages and dates of death of 100 women killed by their husbands between 1990 and 1993. These facts are handwritten in a florid script at the base of the installation.
The main part of the work is a large grid with basically a horizontal orientation. It is composed of shallow boxes standing upright, which are modeled after those ubiquitous boxes containing flowers or other mementoes from mourners in cemeteries in San Juan where burial is above ground. But Ms. Hernandez has instead painted on the bottom of each black box brightly colored imagery that addresses the fragmentation caused by domestic violence.
One saying declares that sometimes a public sacrifice is necessary. The families of some victims were reluctant to have a case made public, but Ms. Hernandez, who showed the work first in a public building in San Juan, felt that such a blatant illustration was the only way to preserve the domestic violence law.
Art created to serve a political cause often emphasizes rhetoric over any quality that can emotionally affect the viewer. Ms. Hernandez makes sure her installation has a subtle and lasting impact by making her symbols and their execution lively enough to keep the viewer's eye moving around the work to let the artist's intentions sink in. She seems to have a playful bent, which leavens her harsh messages: an ancillary piece, ''Crucigrama,'' is an outsize crossword puzzle having roughly the same format as the major work. The letters in the squares, each made by hand and having an original twist, form intersecting Spanish words that refer to domestic violence. In a glass case is a large book of stories, which Ms. Hernandez illustrated. The stories are about relationships between the sexes and are sometimes bawdy. It is reassuring to discover that this artist on a mission can see beyond the wreckage.
