Some mantelpiece ornaments, including a plaster madonna, went tumbling to the floor where they all broke.

A blue-robed plaster Madonna stood in the shelter of the porcelain rim.

Later we drifted and found: a beach, 20ft of yellow shingle under a dozen palm trees; a grotto more lurid than Lourdes, every glittering bowl crying out for a plaster Madonna; a lagoon in an island's heart reached through a rock tunnel.

She also remembered that a plaster madonna was placed on her front lawn, which was not quite to her taste.

Harper and his three men were fetching the bottles from the store room, then stacking them beside the wayside shrine which was a small stone building about ten foot square with a plaster Madonna inside, and only then carrying them one at a time to the bridge parapet.

They range from vivid painted narratives to shimmering beaded flags, from plaster Madonnas to immense carved wooden drums.

I want to know which," it is the only logical question to ask before forcing him to kneel before a plaster Madonna and swear his honorable intentions.

And so one morning, the neighborhood woke up to find that the plaster Madonna in the church garden, a figure with outstretched hands that greeted commuters going to the subway, had turned mahogany brown.

The 500 objects in this exhibition - shimmering sequinted flags, plaster madonnas, medicine packets wrapped like Christmas gifts, miniature coffins, carved wooden drums - weave African, European and indigenous New World influences together in an art of visceral excitement and disquieting beauty.