Best Artist

No stranger to the art of the nightmare, this season Cajero delivered his wildest exhibition yet. Diana, goddess of the hunt, sprang to violent life in a Cajero installation at Muse. A giant figure in blackened papier-mâché and charred corrugated cardboard, his twisted Diana consorted with a pentangle of baying hounds, five of the most vicious dogs your most fevered imagination could ever summon up. This presentation of this violent 17-foot piece could not have been more timely, coinciding as it did with the bombing of Baghdad. Cajero, a respected teacher around town, just keeps getting better. In the show before this, his rough art conjured up the haunted elderly slouching toward a lonely death in America's nursing homes. His arte povera materials, tattered and torn, are like no one else's; and his subjects--injustice, violence, human despair and desperation--make him an artist of searing conscience.