Cofradía blouse (huipil) c. 1910

This Cofradía blouse, a huipil, was made by a Maya artist, and it lives at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I’m looking at this blouse and just imagining the artist at work, lost in the process. I imagine it was a slow, deliberate process of building up the pattern line by line. I can see them thinking about geometry. The blouse has this dominant diamond pattern in red. It makes me think about landscapes, a bird's eye view of fields, maybe. I see these tiny squares, like little pixels of color—red, blue, yellow—and I imagine the artist choosing each color carefully, considering how they interact. Then there are these little dancing figures near the shoulders. I wonder if the artist thought about movement as they were creating them? The way the threads build up texture must have been really satisfying, like adding layer upon layer. Textiles and painting are intimately linked. It's inspiring to think of artists all over the world, across time, in conversation with one another through color and form. It's an exchange, ideas sparking and re-sparking, pushing each other forward.