Textiles Weave Ancient and Modern Together

The fabric starts as a bold field of red, showing off the astonishingly high thread count, before it gives way to a black-and-white checkerboard pattern that repeats for the remaining length of the piece. It’s a thoroughly modern celebration of geometry, color, and simplicity. And it’s about 500 years old.

There is nothing new under the sun; everything old is new again. That’s the first lesson learned from ​“Weaving and the Social World: 3,000 Years of Ancient Andean Textiles,” on exhibit at the Yale University Art Gallery until Sept. 18.

There are other lessons, too. In the obvious skill with which the textiles were made, and the inventiveness of the techniques on display, the pieces in the exhibit are a small treasure trove for modern weavers and fashionistas. In the bare fact of their remarkable survival and preservation — some of the pieces are 1,000 years old and look like they could have been made last year — lies a deep and complicated story about the power of art to send a message even through centuries of exploitation and conquest.

The weaving tradition of the Andes, which is still alive today, stretches back millennia, and the exhibit shines simply for having collected so many exemplary pieces from its history in one place. Some of the textiles highlight the vividness of the dyes the weavers use, particularly the reds obtained from cochineal insects. Some of them show off the weavers’ ability to make beautiful fabric with impossibly thin thread, the result of hundreds of hours of labor. A gallery of pieces that employ macaw feathers stuns in the brilliance of the colors and — again — seemingly modern geometry of the ancient designs. Another gallery of embroidered fabric features what is believed to be a flock of shamans visiting the spirit world, probably with the help of ayahuasca.

Some of the pieces in the exhibit, as curator Dicey Taylor explained, were likely funereal clothes. Others were probably pieces made for shrines. One deep red tunic was so well preserved because it was originally found stuffed in a jar. So how did these pieces end up in private collections, and in museums?

For those of us who ask these kinds of questions, it’s tempting to cry foul, to tell a simple story about the exploitation of a people by a colonial power. That’s part of it. But it’s also more complicated than that. When I asked Taylor about it, she explained that burial sites and shrines are all over Peru, and are still being discovered all the time — dating not only to the Inca, but to the peoples who predate the Inca, who are the source of many of the pieces in the exhibit. In one particular case, villagers came across a stash of textiles that they knew were old and valuable and began selling them. Archeologists caught wind of it and rushed to the village to buy up the lot. They bought what was left, but the villagers had already sold most of what they’d found to other people, who would surely sell them to collectors, who then sell them to other collectors. Some of the pieces end up in museums; others in private collections; others, it is unclear.

So, over a thousand years ago, someone plucked the feathers off a living macaw — ​“they knew how many feathers you could take off before you killed the bird,” Taylor explained — painstakingly strung them together on fine thread, and sewed those lines of brilliant color onto a piece of fabric that other people had already spent weeks creating. The Wari empire, which produced this fabric, rose and fell; the territory it controlled became part of the conquering Inca empire centuries later, which in turn fell to the Spanish. The textiles in the exhibit were found somehow, collected, bought and sold who knows how many times. And they are here now, on Chapel Street, with their intense colors and sometimes startlingly modern designs, their material preservation ultimately a vehicle for their ability to affect and quietly awe us here in 2016, as they did the day they were made.