The Serpentine Essence of a Chancay Gauze Headdress

A colorful Chancay gauze fragment in the Michael C. Carlos Museum’s collection of Andean textiles deserves consideration for the ingenious yet unpublished technical combination of its weave structure. Its Late Intermediate Period weaver pushed beyond technical limitations to join the laborious techniques of gauze weaving and discontinuous warping to reinforce the cloth’s protective and regenerative functions. Worn on the head during moments of transformation, the headdress would have empowered its wearer in ritual contexts, perhaps helping her to initiate her own rebirth in the afterlife. The weaver’s sophisticated fusion of the two techniques resulted in “jumping” serpentine figures, rendered in gold, dark brown, and white, on an indigo background. This depiction of serpent movement, created by the use of a discontinuous warp made whole through the tying of tiny knots, recalls both the corporeal process of the cloth’s production as well as the physical exertion of snakes. Moreover, the cloth’s overall polychrome patterning evokes the vivid dorsal patterning of snakes who have just shed their skin and emerged headfirst as regenerated beings. Through an examination of the Carlos Museum textile, this paper connects the symbolic attributes of fiber with the physical process of gauze weaving and the funerary contexts from which gauzes are excavated. It also problematizes a tendency in the literature to apply the term “gauze” to openwork textiles; gauze weaving with its inherent iconography must be seen as a deliberate technical choice made by the weaver for its distinctive symbolic connotations

Mutable Form and Materiality: Toward a Critical History of New Tapestry Networks

This article raises two concerns underpinning the need for a critical history of fiber art in the 20th century. The first is a critique of aesthetic formalism predominant in the Lausanne Biennale during the 1960s and 70s, which overlooks artistic, ideological, and political milieus that drew together textile artists from localities formerly treated as peripheral in art history. The second holds to account Euro-American institutions and related historiographies for their curatorial exclusion of Arab and African fiber artists. Such inclusion, I argue, would have conjured tapestry's deeper incongruities, which emanated from unresolved questions at the core of modernism: the assigning and appropriating of artistic identities, the evaded issue of state patronage, and the persistent ideological and aesthetic problem of craft and its framing within economies. By comparing three artists: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Jagoda Buic, and Safia Farhat, I reassess New Tapestry networks, myths, and systems of state and institutional support. The circulation of Abakanowicz, Buic, and Farhat around a conflux of dimensions signals a new pathway for recovering and writing a history of fiber art, and perhaps a reflection on modernism at large

The Serpentine Essence of a Chancay Gauze Headdress

A colorful Chancay gauze fragment in the Michael C. Carlos Museum’s collection of Andean textiles deserves consideration for the ingenious yet unpublished technical combination of its weave structure. Its Late Intermediate Period weaver pushed beyond technical limitations to join the laborious techniques of gauze weaving and discontinuous warping to reinforce the cloth’s protective and regenerative functions. Worn on the head during moments of transformation, the headdress would have empowered its wearer in ritual contexts, perhaps helping her to initiate her own rebirth in the afterlife. The weaver’s sophisticated fusion of the two techniques resulted in “jumping” serpentine figures, rendered in gold, dark brown, and white, on an indigo background. This depiction of serpent movement, created by the use of a discontinuous warp made whole through the tying of tiny knots, recalls both the corporeal process of the cloth’s production as well as the physical exertion of snakes. Moreover, the cloth’s overall polychrome patterning evokes the vivid dorsal patterning of snakes who have just shed their skin and emerged headfirst as regenerated beings. Through an examination of the Carlos Museum textile, this paper connects the symbolic attributes of fiber with the physical process of gauze weaving and the funerary contexts from which gauzes are excavated. It also problematizes a tendency in the literature to apply the term “gauze” to openwork textiles; gauze weaving with its inherent iconography must be seen as a deliberate technical choice made by the weaver for its distinctive symbolic connotations