Aymara Weavings: Indigenous Andean Textiles at the Saint Louis Art Museum

The Saint Louis Art Museum exhibition "Aymara Weavings: The Indigenous Andes' is displaying, for the first time, a group of textiles from the Bolivian high plateau. Dating primarily from the 18th- and 19th- centuries, these mantles, skirts and ponchos indicate how Aymara artists maintained and reinvented ancient artistic practices to express Indigenous identities during the colonial and early republican periods. The term 'Aymara' encompasses a diversity of small-scale and communal governments, or ayllus, with dialects in a common language and shared roots in the Andean Altiplano pre-dating the 15th-century Inka expansion.

As the first exhibition dedicated to post- Spanish-conquest Andean weaving at SLAM, it introduces visitors to the techniques, media and cultural histories of a major Aymara artform. The gallery displays ten textiles either as fully visible rectangular panels, or draped on forms to suggest the appearance when worn. Gallery texts describe the technical aspects of production as well as changes in the format and use of these garments.

Pattern and form vary according to local design systems. Yet each weaving reflects the vertical structure of the warp, an ancient practice in the highlands. Andean weavers produce fully finished, four-selvedged cloth that is neither cut nor pieced after removal from the loom. The artists envision the final design and dimensions of a garment when they begin to weave. The warping of the loom establishes the design system so that stripes, bands and broad fields of colour predominate. Men typically wear stripes vertically, as woven, while women rotate the cloth horizontally.

Thematically, the exhibition addresses notions of continuity and strategic adaptation. Materials and methods follow pre-conquest models. By the first millennium BCE, weavers in the Andean highlands used camelid fibres, and the earliest warp-faced textiles from the region-direct antecedents to the exhibition works-date to around 1000 CE.

Some garments in the exhibition correspond to pre-Hispanic formats. For instance, a woman's dress from the Oruro department of Bolivia features two broad, red stripes against a variegated purple-brown field. To wear it, women wrapped the cloth around the body with the top edge under the arms, then folded over each shoulder and fastened with two pins. In the exhibition, this work appears alongside a group of various fastening pins. These include a copper-alloy stick pin from the Inka cra with a llama finial, as well as a late 19th-century silver pin with repousse imagery of an anachronistic double-cagle, an emblem associated with Habsburg Spanish rule of the Andes.

These gowns became widespread by the 15th century, when the Inka empire expanded from Cusco to surrounding regions, taking in Aymara territories in present-day Bolivia. The newly established colonial-Inka state organised workshops around Lake Titicaca. While Inka-era weaving is often associated with pictorial weft- faced tapestries, Andean artists also produced warp-faced cloth.

The works in this show also reflect more recent innovations. Following the Spanish invasion of the 1530s, a new wave of colonists built factories and outlawed certain types of clothing such as the wrapped dress. European- style trousers, shirts and other tailored garments proliferated. Aymara people, however, retained their own textiles as outerwear, the most visible layer of clothing.

As women began to wear underskirts, the gown transitioned into an apron-like overskirt. The exhibition features such a garment from the Aroma province of the Bolivian department of La Paz. Like the earlier dress, this skirt uses a brown ground, wide red stripe and additional design clements. The photograph of the flat garment shows the incredible length that some overskirts achieved. When pleated, as the piece in the exhibition is, the skirt wraps once around the body. It would have included an upper panel, now separated from the base.

Men's garments also changed in the Spanish colonial period. For instance, the exhibition displays two ponchos. One, from the Bolivian department of Oruro, bears a pattern of stripes. Three sections join to form an overall symmetry, with each component woven separately with a distinct colour sequence.

The poncho form developed in Spain; however, the construction of this striped poncho corresponds to the hallmarks of Aymara weaving such as four selvedges and a use of camelid yarns in a warp-faced plain weave. Additionally, exhibition visitors can view a rare tapestry-woven poncho that imitates the appearance of contemporancous ikats from the Andes.

Ponchos largely replaced an existing style of tunic-seen in a black example in the exhibition-as men's daily wear, after Spanish rulers banned tunics in the late 18th century. Each garment consists of a longer- than-wide layout with a woven neck opening, worn folded over the shoulders. Ponchos generally combine multiple segments of cloth and feature open sides, whereas tunics use a single weaving and stitching on each side, except for an opening at the top left for the arms.

Spanish textiles impacted not only the form of garments but also media. Indigenous spinners developed polychrome yarns in response to a European luxury cloth with red wefts and black warps. Named tornesol, this material seems to change colours as it moves in the sunlight. Aymara weavers replicated this structure.

They also experimented more broadly. Chimi, an Aymara-language term, encompasses a range of ways to create shimmering surfaces. In a man's mantle from the exhibition, a broad central field in golden-brown features subtle variations in tone. A deeper look at this area shows two-ply yarn that combines a neutral, buff strand and a second thread in a brighter, warmer yellow.

Such tonal variation attracted attention from American fine-art collectors in the late 20th century, when Aymara weaving frequently garnered comparison to expressionist colour- field paintings, especially the work of Mark Rothko. For Aymara peoples, however, these areas are more frequently analogised as pampas, or open fields in the land. Weaving terminology in Indigenous Andean languages links textiles to animate forces of the earth, everyday social relations and cosmological aspects.

Other intricate details manifesting deep technical knowledge can be seen in these works. Artists use complex techniques to create bands with motifs: pictorial emblems such as radiating suns, S-forms, birds, as well as sequences of stacked, alternating colours. A woman's mantle in the exhibition, for instance, features more patterned than plainweave areas. Along the border runs a tubular trim with eye motifs. This is created as a separate component independent of the loom. Artists weave the trim by crossing the vertical warps over one another and a spiralling weft, here in brown. As the weaving advances, they stitch the warp to the already finished edge of the cloth.

The ten textiles in 'Aymara Weavings' arrived at the museum through a larger gift from Paul and Elissa Cahn. Paul Cahn (1925-2025) was a remarkable collector of Indigenous textiles from the Americas as well as 18th-century silver by English and American smiths. Cahn purchased the exhibition works between the mid-1990s and late 2000S from dealers in the United States who had collected primarily in Bolivia in preceding decades.

Through a series of gifts in 2017 and 2018, the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Minneapolis Institute of Art received over 150 fibre-based works and related art from the Cahns. Weavings given to each muscum span regions and practices across the Americas: Andean garments, Diné wool blankets, Pueblo cotton mantles, Saltillo serapes from Mexico and Northwest Coast wearing blankets.

The Cahns' gifts significantly expand the representation of Indigenous art from the Andes at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Since the mid-20th century, SLAM's collection has concentrated on ancient works from South America. Visitors to the collection galleries today encounter a range of sculptures, from Paracas ceramics to Chimú metalwork.

Additionally, in 2018 the museum offered an exhibition based on the pre-Hispanic weavings collection, 'Balance and Opposition in Ancient Peruvian Textiles', which included a Wari featherwork panel, an Inka tunic and Paracas garments. A number of past exhibitions have focused on the Cahns' collection of North American textiles, most recently "Southwest Weavings: 800 Years of Artistic Exchange' (see HALI 198, PP. 47-51). "Aymara Weavings' presents select Andean works form the Cahn collection for the first time at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Paul Cahn reflected on the donation in a 2019 interview. When asked what he would like to accomplish with the collection, he said, I decided giving the works to the [Saint Louis Art] Museum was the best way to ensure a future where people could enjoy and learn from the art.' He saw Aymara weavings as a stunning and highly developed body of work-among the finest textiles in the world-that deserved greater recognition.

Alexander Brier Marr is associate curator of Native American art at the Saint Louis Art Museum. The exhibition runs until 13 September 2026