coordinates on the map of Randolph's inquiry into technoscientine hybridity. These paintings highlight her immersion in processes of figuration and storytelling. But in order better to explore the spiraling story cycles built into Randolph's work. I want to loop back, to begin again with another pair of paintings. "Time's journey," 1987 (fig. 21), is a life-cycle portrait of Randolph's mother. A round-shouldered old woman dressed in a simple blue skirt and blouse, she is seated in a half-lotus position at the center of the picture. Her prayer rug is a thick, round, luscious blue and black carpet of the cosmos. Spiraling galaxies--typical of the celestial objects that recur constantly in Randolph's iconography--lace the starry space that supports the curved body of the elder woman. Snaking down from the top of the composition in a sweeping curve, four faces mark the passage of a life from babyhood through mature middle age. The viewer of the painting looks from the Mexican side of the border toward Big Bend. The lavender-and lime-hued xeric plants of the desiccated desert in the foreground rise into a sere, sharp-peaked, rugged background--both elements reiterated throughout Randolph's work. We have the ages of a particular woman here, one located in a specific, if capacious, landscape--not the ages of Universal Man in abstract time and space. This specific wise woman, whose body is threaded with the moments of her life, links the earth and the heavens into a single vivid timescape. This is the woman-centered vision that animates Randolph's art to its core.

Like "Time's Journey," "Presiding," 1991 (fig. 19), is a large canvas that deals with the passages of life and death. But unlike the recursive spiraling in "Time's Journey" the motion in "Presiding" rises from bottom right to upper left-of-center in an ascending trajectory, emphasized by the smoke rising from a large burning nest at the feet of a nude, straight-backed, young, chestnut-haired woman seated with arms crossed over her breasts. Judge or witness--but mortal herself--the upright woman is presiding over the opening of a grave. The rectilinear, expulsive force of the painting is emphasized by the straight, thin tree trunk, topped with a coppery foliage, placed to the side of the woman. The bony hand of a human skeleton clutches her left ankle, while from the burning nest the birdlike skeleton of a compacted and fossilized archaeopteryx surges into the velvet-black night sky above a golden sunset / sunrise that is echoed by

the gold sheen of beach dunes. The rising fossil is a fleshless phoenix, ambiguously promising life and death in the millennial last days of the painting. The portrait looks without flinching into the decade of the 1990s recorded in the present exhibition. I want the young woman of this painting, and the old mother tracing the moments of her life, to preside over my readings of Randolph's "Millennial Myths." 4 Graves open, indeed, but what issues from them is a matter for careful witness and judicious nurture.

1 grew up a Catholic in Colorado, and it is impossible to see Randolph's images and not recall the complex physicality and spirituality of Mexican and Hispanic reli- gious art that this Anglo Texas woman has inherited. Inter- laced in Randolph's work with the currents of living artistic practice along the U.S.-Mexico border is the bodily spiri-tuality that erupted in Italian late medieval and Renaissance visual art, especially the fresco cycles of men like Fra Angelico (see fig. 22). I spent a week in Florence in the summer of 1997, drowning in the reticulated imagery of the layer upon layer of stories laid down in the frescoes and paintings sedimented in that city. I cannot help but see Randolph's millennial visions as part of the lineage of these symbolic, corporeal, technical, mystical art practices. Formal elements from Renaissance visual art and many devices and symbols from Mexican work pepper Randolph's paintings. But, for me, the strongest evidence of her historical kinship with these two disparate forces is that her painting returns so often and so vigorously to the