Pre-Columbian, South Coast Peru, Chavin-Karwar, ca. 4th to 3rd century BCE. A cotton based textile fragment from the North Coast of Peru, but purportedly found in South Coast Peru. The tightly woven fabric is decorated with curvilinear and linear motifs as well as zoomorphic, camelid forms of refined iron-rich pigments. As a wearable and portable artform in which complex imagery was featured, textiles spread Chavin iconography from the northern coast, where it originated, to the south, where this fragment was purportedly found. Even more fascinating, the painting style and visual motifs resemble those of stone carvings at Chavin de Huantar. Size: 25" W x 25.25" H (63.5 cm x 64.1 cm); 30.625" W x 30.75" H (77.8 cm x 78.1 cm) with mat and lucite framing

Andean textile art began as early as the third millennium BCE and continued to be a medium of artistic expression as well as a medium used for communicating cultural information - religious, social, and political - for thousands of years. Interestingly, in Peru fabric art preceded ceramics by more than a thousand years. Sometimes designs were woven into the fabric, sometimes they were embroidered, and sometimes, as we see in this example, they were painted onto the fabric.

The Chavin people lived in the northern Highland Andes, and their capital, Chavin de Huantar, is an UNESCO World Heritage Site. The artwork of Chavin represents the first widespread style in the Andes. The center of Chavin de Huantar is a massive, flat-topped pyramid, surrounded by lower platforms. Between 1200 and 500 BCE the pyramid space was used for religious ceremonies. The Old Temple, constructed very early in the history of the site, consists of a series of passageways built around a circular courtyard; within were carved stone monuments showing jaguars, serpents, and other figures with transformative and/or anthropomorphic figures.

For a similar example in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, please see https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/315784

Provenance: private Hawaii, USA collection; ex H. J. Westermann collection, Germany, collected between 1950-1960

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Losses to peripheries and a few areas of loss and/or loose weaving to the interior of the composition. Normal fading to pigments.