Gracias, amigos!

Waynesville’s Gallery 86 displays works by a broad selection of Latin American artists in Latin Palette: Artistas de Las Montanas.

If you think Diego Rivera’s huge murals define Hispanic art, you’ll be surprised by the variety of works in Latin Palette: Artistas de Las Montanas, a Gallery 86 exhibition of works by artists of Latin American descent living in Western North Carolina.

Organized by gallery director Paula Bolado, the show includes works by artists with ties to Peru, Cuba, Mexico, Panama and Ecuador. Assembling the exhibition was a group effort, says Bolado. The gallery called upon teachers of English as a foreign language, a Roman Catholic priest and a Spanish student from UNCA to help locate artists for the show.

Some lively colored works are instantly recognizable as Latin art, making use of the shapes and palette commonly associated with the genre. Other pieces have no obvious regional roots. Elena Campbell was born in the Andes to a French father and an Italian mother. Her watercolors refer to her homeland only through subject matter. Cuban native Silvia Williams shows a rhythmic painting of a toreador, but her most engaging works are a couple of very small, well thought-out, richly colored mixed media pieces.

One of the most innovative works in the show is “Pieta Metamorphosis” by Fernando Gomez. Small, carefully rendered, cut-out drawings of a marble slab illustrate Michelangelo’s carving process. The drawings are done in charcoal on thick, stark white paper.

Velma P. Middleton de Vigil presents a selection of leather bowls with images and symbols drawn from her Spanish ancestry. She also displays a ceramic tile with a relief carving of a Spanish mission church flanked by two bell towers and topped with silver crosses.

Anna Feriello is a visiting associate professor at Western Carolina University, directing the Craft Revival Documentation Project. She photographed Latino images during her time as a Fulbright scholar in Latin America. Her small, soft-textured digital works include “Archeological Ruin,” “Viejo,” “Panama” and “Museum Pottery, Panama.” In the latter photo, a dusty light struggles through a small window to rake gently across the rims of a group of clay jugs.

One of the most interesting contrasts in the exhibition is between two similarly-sized paintings of homes. Fabiola Suarez paints a courtyard in vibrant primary colors, evoking a brilliant sunlight and energetic activity, while Geovany Medina depicts a quiet cottage surrounded by — and almost overcome by — dense, dark foliage.

Perhaps the work in the exhibition most reminiscent of the Mexican muralists is that of Ecuadorian Veronica Proano. Proano places her simplified images on Cubist-influenced backgrounds: In her “Payaso,” a clown dressed in white stands before blue-and-green triangles.

“Bufon” is a small trickster painting with a carefully textured ground by Juan Penamejia. A native of Guadalajara, his works are clearly influenced by Surrealist painters Freda Kahlo and Salvador Dali. These works are filled with cultural symbolism. In his “Evolution Unfinished”, he documents the life cycle of a fish, from egg to adult, while a skeletal specter in a bright-blue robe floats in an orange sky. A wall of stone arches forms a procession on the right side of the painting, while elsewhere shadowy figures descend a stairway. A stack of geometric shapes in primary colors and a woman with flowing hair walking with a harnessed fish complete the image.

Victor Moraloza, another Mexican artist, began making art in the early ’90s, after a long and painful recovery from severe wounds he received in Vietnam. He makes sculptures from copper, cutting, bending and shaping the metal into animals and flowers. He creates little installations: There’s one of a graceful heron standing beside a basin of water, surrounded by water plants, and another of a huge, fierce-looking eagle, wings spread, perched on a rod holding an American flag. His crown of thorns hangs in the gallery window.

This exhibition showcases just a smattering of the richness brought here from the South. How many more resettled artists will we soon have the pleasure of getting to know?

[Connie Bostic is an Asheville based painter and writer.]

Haywood County Arts Council’s Latin Palette: Artistas de Las Montanas at Gallery 86 (86 North Main St., Waynesville) runs through Saturday, Jan. 6. 452-0593.