Retratos: Lively and Grandly Colorful

NEW YORK CITY

:Throughout the ages, every culture has used portraits to record personages, position, passages and pomp. Few, if any, are more expressive than the Latin American portraiture on view in the extraordinary exhibition "Retratos: 2000 Years of Latin American Portraits." The likenesses are eminently readable and reveal much about the climate in which they were painted.

"Retratos" is on view at El Museum del Barrio through March 20. "Retratos" Family Day is Saturday, February 12, from 12 to 4 pm, with free admission.

The sweeping show is lively and grandly colorful; the pictures fairly dance off the walls. It encompasses a range of 115 objects from as early as the Moche, an advanced pre-Columbian civilization that flourished along the northern coast of Peru from about 100 AD, to paintings created as recently as 2001. The exhibition is arranged to allow a visitor to follow the development of the art and history described as Latin American. The term is a huge umbrella and the scope of the exhibition is equally vast.