NEW YORK CITY (BY Holland Cotter, NYTimes) December 3, 2004 -  How great that New York City's big art institutions are finally catching up with El Museo del Barrio, which started tiny in an East Harlem storefront in 1969 and now perches, larger, grander, still venturesome - and under-visited - on upper Fifth Avenue.

For 35 years the museum has devoted itself to showing Latin American artists, which basically meant introducing them, as almost no one else was doing so. And all that time, it was contributing to a huge new history. Today New York is a Latin American city: well over a quarter of its residents have roots there. That percentage continues to grow, and El Museo, where an eye-opening survey of Latin American portraiture opens today, is growing with it.

So is a broad interest in art from Latin America, to judge by its visibility in museums. Tops among special exhibitions is "The Aztec Empire" at the Guggenheim, focused on material from pre-Columbian Mexico. The show is just fantastic, a killer. It's not only the most intense art experience in Manhattan, but possibly the most intense theatrical experience, too. It will turn your notions of art-as-beauty-and-goodness inside out and infiltrate your dreams.

"The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530-1830" at the Metropolitan Museum dramatizes, epochally, the glorious fusion and ruinous collision of native and European cultures that was Nuevo Mundo. And the reinstalled Museum of Modern Art has Latin America on its mind, too: a small white painting by the Venezulean artist Armando Reverón (1889-1954) now floats, like a patch of Caribbean cloud covering, among the Pollocks and Picassos.

Which brings us back to El Museo, where "Retratos: 2,000 Years of Latin American Portraits" offers a taste of all of the above. Reverón is here. So are colonial painting and pre-Columbian sculpture. Organized with the San Antonio Museum of Art and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, the show follows a still-life survey at El Museo four years ago but is far more ambitious in scope and scale, with 100 or so loans from a dozen Latin American countries. The two-millennium time span is a liability; a close-up look at any portion of it would have been more satisfying. But with so much art from Latin America, of all eras, still so little known, the sampler approach is understandable. And besides, there is an absolutely riveting smaller show locked inside the big one.

To establish the antiquity of a portrait tradition in the Americas, the survey starts way before Columbus or the Aztecs, with a half-dozen ceramic vessels made by the Moche people in Peru between the second and seventh centuries. All are in the shape of a male head, and the face of each is closely observed and individualized, right down to frown lines and minor scars.

From there, though, we shoot to the 16th century and a painting by Andrés Sánchez Galque's titled "Mulattoes of Esmereldas" (1599), on loan from the Prado and one of the show's prizes. The earliest known dated portrait from colonial South America, it depicts three elegant dark-skinned men, descendants of Indians and African slaves in what is now Ecuador. Identified by name and age in inscriptions, they wear European silks and ruffed collars but also display distinctly unEuropean lip rings and nose plugs of gold.

To the Spanish king for whom it was made, the painting would have been exotic proof of geographical sovereignty. To 21st-century eyes, its blend of African, European and native elements distills the essence of a multicultural continent and of a society built on minutely calibrated hierarchies of race and class.

Art of the colonial, or viceregal, era (1492-1810) constitutes the bulk of the exhibition and a fascinating show in itself. This was a time of flourishing religious and secular portraiture, of Baroque extravagance and Enlightenment restraint, of regal polish and regional verve, of brutality coursing through beauty. Spanish artists, Creole artists and mixed-blood mestizo artists, many of them self-taught, shared the patronage of an image-hungry colonial society and generated an art unique to the Americas.

Some of its distinctiveness lay in details: the carved maraca clutched by the young daughter of a colonial governor and the funky little island farmhouse behind a chic equestrienne in portraits by the wonderful Puerto Rican artist José Campeche (1751-1809).

At the same time, entire art genres were invented, as in the case of portraits of nuns wearing floral crowns and breastplate-size medallions, or "shields," painted with religious scenes. Such images were commissioned when a nun took her final vows, exchanging an old life for a new one, and they are as fragrant with symbols of purity and desire as wedding bouquets.

Mortuary portraits of children marked a different kind of transition. In one dated 1805, a toddler named José Manuel de Cervantes y Velasco lies in his lace-trimmed coffin dressed as the Archangel Michael, with jewel-studded wings and a plumed crown. Interestingly, his costume finds an echo in a similar outfit, like something designed for "Les Indes Gallantes" and topped by a feathered hat, worn by the Inca King Tupac Amaru in a portrait in the Met's Andes show. This likeness, too, was posthumous, but done nearly two centuries after the king had been causelessly beheaded by order of the Spanish viceroy, an act of political violence that burned like an ember in Inca memory.

Art in Latin America has always been a vehicle for social and political commentary. This translates into straight-out propaganda in a full-length portrait of the independence leader Simón Bolívar, his heroism trumpeted in a scarlet banderole, by the Peruvian painter José Gil de Castro, an artist to remember. Elsewhere the politics of class and race are more obliquely evoked, as in a magnificent mid-19th-century portrait of an Afro-Brazilian woman from Bahia, who wears a scoop-neck dress, white gloves and gold necklaces that could be straight from Ghana.

Even with its culturally specific content, this painting fits effortlessly into the international styles of its day. So did Latin American modernism in the early 20th century. Far from being out of the loop, it helped to create the loop. Diego Rivera developed a bravura brand of Cubism in Paris before switching to descriptive realism for his mural art. And he later applied that realism to portraits of New World socialites like Elisa Saldívar de Gutiérrez Roldán, whom he depicted, surely with irony, in lace-up sandals and a flounced "peasant" skirt, self-conscious signs of Méxicanidad.

Frida Kahlo made such Mexicanness, with its lingering revolutionary associations, insistently personal. In her self-portraits, she wears it like armor, a nun's shield painted with the Crucifixion. This sense of identity also inflects María Izquierdo's 1940 portrait of her three young nieces, but here, radiating in their mestizo faces, it feels warm and soaked-in, like tropical light.

These extraordinary painters have had a resounding impact on artists who have succeeded them. In a 1991 self-portrait by the Mexican painter Nahum Zenil, Kahlo's face appears as a giant heart swelling from his chest. And the political dynamic intrinsic to Latin American art has had wide influence, anticipating as it did the identity-based art that swept the United States in the 1980's and 90's.

In fact, the realities of race, class and power implicit in "Mulattoes of Esmereldas" in the 16th century and in "Woman From Bahia" in the 19th century are every bit as complex and history-shaping now as they ever were, and new art acknowledges this.

The last piece in the last gallery is a 1998 painting by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, "Carter, Anna and Daryl." Although it looks abstract, it is based on digitized images of DNA samples taken from members of the artist's family. Ethnicity and gender seem invisible here, but through science they may also be manipulable, rendering the fleet, imprecise thing that portraiture has always been even more elusive, more ephemeral.

By the time we get to the end of the show - a curatorial team effort led by Marion Oettinger Jr. of the San Antonio Museum, Fatima Bercht of El Museo del Barrio and Carolyn Kinder Carr and Miguel Bretos of the National Portrait Gallery - we've covered an exhausting tract of cultural ground, much of it unfamiliar. And if the trip proves at once too much and not enough, what can you do? Americans know shockingly little about their own history, and the history of Latin America is now every American's history. As we move through "Retratos," we start to learn.

We also traverse a museum that has lessons of its own to impart. It balances aesthetics and politics simply by acknowledging that the two are intertwined. It pushes and prods the past, when letting it sit there looking pretty would be easier. And it offers some of the most beautiful and disquieting art there is. These are some of the reasons that El Museo is increasingly looking not like the last stop on Museum Mile but the first, like a one-ship armada leading the fleet.

"Retratos: 2,000 Years of Latin American Portraits" remains at El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, (212) 831-7272, through March 20. It travels to the San Diego Museum of Art (April 16-June 12); Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach. (July 23-Oct. 2); National Portrait Gallery in Washington (Oct. 21-Jan. 8, 2006); and the San Antonio Museum of Art (Feb. 4-April 30, 2006)