Traditional Textiles of the Andes: Life and Cloth in the Highlands

by Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M. H. De Young Memorial Museum, Lynn A. Meisch (Editor)

The Andean Mountains are home to a rich heritage of textile design and weaving. In particular, cloth has traditionally been the most significant art form and cultural vehicle of the Aymara and Quechua peoples. Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, this book features eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century indigenous textiles woven by the Aymara and Quechua. The elaborately patterned pieces are all drawn from the previously unpublished Jeffrey Appleby Collection and include everyday and ceremonial textiles of all ponchos, skirts, belts, hats, and slings. The accompanying essays by Lynn Ann Meisch, Amy Oakland Rodman, Ed Franquemont, and Margot Blum Schevill address such topics as the long history of fibers, dyes, imagery, and textile use in the region; and the effects of urbanization and westernization on traditional Andean weaving.

157 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1997

Reviews

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent museum catalog of a large Andean textile collection donated to San Francisco's De Young museum. The collection was given a show in 1997, and the book is also a catalogue raisonne' ( which means, I just learned, " a descriptive catalog of works of art with explanations and scholarly comments."). It includes about 150 color photos, which are just OK in reproduction. The collection is basically of 19th and 20th century textiles from Peru, Bolivia and adjacent Andean states. The scholarly commentary is unusually good: I learned, for example, that Aymara textiles, a trade name for "old striped Andean weavings", were successfully reproduced by contemporary Bolivian weavers, to the consternation of first-world dealers and collectors. Aymara is actually an indigenous language, spoken in Bolivia & Peru, and even has its own Wikipedia, ay.wikipedia.org .

I'm personally more interested in the pre-Conquest textiles, but these are certainly well-worth a look. If you're a collector and don't already have this book, well, you should.