Mexican Indian Folk Designs

252 Motifs from Textiles

Irmgard Weitlaner-Johnson

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486142517
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

This fascinating book is the product of intensive scholarly research, its exacting illustrations based on choice examples of Mexican Indian textiles in many different museums and private collections. Incorporating abstract and geometric forms as well as highly stylized images of flowers, plants, animals, birds, and humans, the patterns represent more than 20 major Mexican Indian cultures.
Among the designs are a two-faced feathered serpent from the Huichol culture, an allover pattern dominated by horizontal zigzags woven by the Otomí, and a flower and leaf design from the Tepehua. The Huasteco people are represented by a bold motif featuring prancing animals with bushy tails; a Nahuatl design depicts a lion with a flower in his mouth; while an elegant curvilinear Mazatec motif features flowers, vines, and birds. Other peoples whose art is represented include the Tarahumara, Tepecano, Mestizo, Zapotec, Mixteco, and Cuicatec. In the bold, startling designs originated by these cultures are primal links to the imagery of other cultures and traditions, centuries old and worldwide.
Artists, designers, and craftspeople will value this modestly priced collection as a source of striking and unusual royalty-free designs for inspiration and practical use; anyone interested in Mexican Indian culture will find it an important reference as well.

Publisher’s Note

The PRESENT VOLUME is a new selection of illustrations from the scholarly, carefully researched two-volume work Design Motifs on Mexican Indian Textiles by Irmgard Weidaner-Johnson. The aim of the original and of this new version is to stimulate interest in the artistic creativity of Mexican Indian textiles by acquainting the reader with a large number of different design elements (and significant variants) associated with Mexican Indian textiles.

Two hundred fifty-two designs, taken from motifs on textiles from twenty ethnic groups, are included. They have been arranged by ethnic group, in a geographical sequence from the northwest to the southeast of Mexico. A map showing the location of thirty-five Mexican ethnic groups, including those represented in this volume, will be found on page iv.

The designs were transferred to paper by three methods: The majority were derived by reconstructing the designs on squared paper; some were traced directly onto paper from the source material; a few were drawn freehand. The captions accompanying the designs include the names of the ethnic groups that are the sources of the designs, and a description of the structural elements of each design and the type of textile from which each was taken. English-language descriptions of the textiles are given in the captions, in place of the traditional Mesoamerican names. A brief description of the more common textile types, with their Mexican Indian. designations, follows. No attempt has been made to convey the extent of color usage in the production of Mexican Indian textiles, although the ethnic populations had developed the art of creating and using animal, vegetable and mineral dyes with great sophistication by the time of the Spanish Conquest.

Garment and textile types are common to all Mexican Indian peoples. Among the most common—and most decorated—are the huipil, a woman’s sleeveless tunic-like garment; the faja, a sash or belt worn by men and women; the enredo, a wraparound skirt; the quench-quemitl , a woman’s shoulder cape; the servilleta, a square or rectangular cloth used for covering food or for ceremonial purposes; and the talega, a woven pouch or bag. Almost all the designs of these traditional forms are pre-Columbian in origin.

The various elements found in the designs are all widely used and reflect the natural environment, the enduring place in the culture of pre-Columbian imagery and in many instances the encroachment of Western influence. Geometric figures such as triangles, diamonds, zigzag lines, squares, rectangles and to a lesser extent chevrons and parallelograms are often found singly or combined in repeating patterns as borders or as background fill-in for allover patterns. Bird forms appear in almost every type of Indian textile. They range from small simple designs to large elaborately ornamented representations of multiheaded eagles. Animal forms (dog, monkey, horse, bull, lion) are all widely used. Plant motifs are also used extensively, including the Tree-of-Life motif, often seen as a free-standing design in combination with animal motifs, typically butterflies and hummingbirds, and other plant motifs. In many cases, the motifs themselves have become so conventionalized or stylized that they seem unrecognizable. A traditional device, the ilhuitl motif, comprising an S-motif, is ubiquitous and gives rise to many variations, including Z-...