Arturo Garcia Bustos, "The Charge." Image courtesy Kittredge Gallery.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera aren't dead yet. Their spirit lives on in two artistic successors, Mexican printmakers and painters Arturo Garcia Bustos and Rina Lazo, whose work (including Kahlo and Rivera portraits) is on the walls now at Kittredge. The artists will also be there today for a printmaking party.

Garcia Bustos and Lazo worked with Kahlo and Rivera respectively from the mid-'40s until their deaths. Married since the late '40s, the pair work in both painting (murals and freestanding works) and prints, channeling the tempestuous, worker-oriented politics of 20th-century Mexico in every work. Now in their 70s, the artists are still very active, and--as is obvious from the recent work at Kittredge--still highly deserving of all the accolades they've won.

Bustos' work is, like that of Rivera, strong, challenging, defiant. In woodcuts, lithographs, lino prints and etchings from 1947 to last year, he mixes iconographical subjects with fine textures and dramatic shading. "The Charge Against the People," a lament for those trampled in the student massacres of 1968, looks dizzyingly upward, Dali-style, into the hoofs and muscled thighs of a crazed horse, the sword of his rider slicing down from heaven. The shadowed guitarist in "Who will light my Chesterfield?" sings a lament against injust politics and trade from the U.S., surely one of the works that got him banned from U.S. entry during the 1950s. Technically, his prints are a marvel: the sweeping brush of Diego Rivera's portrait, or the three-dimensionality of the the Precolumbian god in "Life Emerging from Death Itself," the paper pushed out from being printed while wet.

Lazo, on the other hand, is political but not strident. Her prints are painterly, whether the dramatic ochre and charcoal of her lithograph cave paintings, or the subtle downstrokes of women's hair in her prints made while incarcerated during the student movement of 1968.

It's not often that this caliber of artist mixes with such a sweeping range of history, here in Tacoma. See it while you can.

"Arturo Garcia Bustos and Rina Lazo: Sixty Years of Political Printmaking in Mexico" is up through April 17 at Kittredge Gallery, University of Puget Sound, North Lawrence and North 15th Streets, Tacoma. Reception and printmaking 5 p.m. tonight, April 8; then 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, noon-5 p.m. Saturdays. Jeffry Mitchell's mixed-media light sculptures "Some Things and Their Shadows" shows in the main gallery area.