Wari Tie-Dye Textiles (ca. 425–1100) — The Public Domain Review

Wari textiles such as those presented here comprise some of the most extraordinary examples of Andean fabric art known to us. When worn, these rich tunics would have played against the textures, colors, and sounds made by the wearer’s jewelry, facial adornment, and other garments to create a rich, multisensory impact on all those who passed. But despite their beauty and complexity, Wari textiles have gone under-researched relative to items produced by the later Inca. It’s a matter complicated by shaky provenance information: many Andean textiles entered Global North collections by means of unscrupulous dealers buying from huaqueros, a Latin American term for looters that derives from the Quechua word waka, meaning a sacred site. As a result, it is difficult if not impossible to link many of these pieces to their original archaeological contexts. What’s more, careful scrutiny by experts has revealed that a number of Wari patchwork items have undergone surreptitious recent interventions. Ann Rowe of the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., has documented cases of pieces being cut, cropped, repatched, restitched — even converted from one type of garment into another, as in the case of a tunic that was sewn into a mantle. In the process, argues anthropologist Penelope Dransart, the piece was transformed from a garment intended to be worn on the body to a piece meant to be displayed à la abstract art, and from just one element in a three-dimensional multisensory ensemble to a flat objet d’art suitable for visual consumption in the West.