Bless the Weavers

Hosteen Klah

Hosteen Klah 

Hosteen Klah 

Hosteen Klah 

Hosteen Klah 

Hosteen Klah 

Navajo boy babies are given the name "Away Eskay,” meaning “Baby Boy” until they exhibit some characteristic or some unusual mark is discovered on their bodies to suggest a name.

It was four or five yeas after his birth that Hosteen Klah was given a name that would remain with him the rest of his life. It was noticed that he used his left hand more readily than his right, so he was called “Klah” which means “left handed.”

Klah is the best recognized of all Navajo Medicine Men of the 20th century. It was he who undertook to learn all the sandpaintings associated with various healing ceremonies, and it was he who was the first to record a healing sandpainting in tapestry form. Prior to his doing this, it was fervently believed by the Navajo that doing so would result in serious illness to the perpetrator. When Klah escaped serious illness following weaving a sandpainting rug, he continued making them.

The Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe was built specifically to house all of Klah’s tapestries, ceremonial effects, and drawings of his sand paintings. It was built in the shape of a Navajo hogan, or traditional house. Unfortunately, Klah passed away just months before the museum was dedicated in his honor. The museum’s name has now been changed to Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian to better define its expanded mission.

Klah was invited by the State of New Mexico to attend the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1934 as the official Medicine Man for the exhibition. He accepted. This photograph was taken shortly before his departure for Chicago.

Spider Woman and Spider Rock

Hazhó'ó naniná

Bless the weavers....

Bless the Weavers: Native American Baskets

Navajo Ganado Rug, c. 1930

Lorenzo Hubbell, a famous early trader at his post in Ganado, Arizona was the creator of the Ganado Red Navajo rug style. He loved and encouraged the use of deep rich red dyed wool for the background color. Design elements from the early Navajo blankets were incorporated into these Ganado Red rugs.

Today the Ganado rugs will have a red background with accent colors of black, grey, white or brown. The central design features a single or double diamond and four triangles, one in each corner. Other design elements may include hook patterns, simple diagonals and cloud or stair design borders.

Noted weavers would include Sadie Curtis, Ruby Hubbard, Sarah Tisi, and Elverna Vanwinkle.

Bauhaus Textiles

Gunta Stölzl (1897-1983) was a German textile artist  who played a fundamental role in the development of the Bauhaus school’s weaving workshop. As the Bauhaus’s only female master she created enormous change within the weaving department as it transitioned from individual pictorial works to modern industrial designs. She joined the Bauhaus as a student in 1920, became a junior master in 1927 and a full master the next year. She was dismissed for political reasons in 1931, a year before the Bauhaus closed under pressure from the Nazis.  The textile department was a neglected part of the Bauhaus when Ms. Stölzl began her career, and its active masters were weak on the technical aspects of textile production. She soon became a mentor to other students and reopened the Bauhaus dye studios in 1921. After a brief departure, Stölzl became the school's weaving director in 1925 when it relocated from Weimar to Dessau and expanded the department to increase its weaving and dyeing facilities. She applied ideas from Modern Art to weaving, experimented with synthetic materials, and improved the department's technical instruction to include courses in mathematics. The Bauhaus weaving workshop became one of its most successful facilities under her direction.

At Walter Gropius's Bauhaus Anni Albers began her first year under Georg Muche and then Johannes Itten. Women were barred from certain disciplines taught at the school, especially architecture, and during her second year, unable to get into a glass workshop with future husband Josef Albers, Anni Albers deferred reluctantly to weaving. With her instructor Gunta Stölzl, however, Albers soon learned to love weaving's tactile construction challenges.

Zapotec Mini-Rug/Coaster Fiber Art

I recently bought some of these on eBay for my collection:

Hand-woven five by five-inch Zapotec wool mini-rug/coasters. No two are alike and it has been kept that way for thousands of years. Unlike the Navajo where women weave, only Zapotec men are allowed to weave these mini wool rugs, but the raising, sheering, and dyeing of the wool is open to anyone.

In these pieces, their 2000-year old heritage is as deep and fertile as the Oaxacan Valley of Southern Mexico where the Zapotec Natives have woven a culture from the fibers of their own strong roots -- dyed with design influences from the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Colonial Spanish, and more recently, even the “modern world."

Teotitlan de Valle, while maintaining a traditional standard of design which distinguishes them as time-honored artisans, have evolved their wool-weaving art; adapting and absorbing ideas from other cultures through history. The Zapotecs today, in weaving each piece, still use 100% sheep’s wool and natural dyes derived from the plants and insects of this rich region. The Spanish colonial floor loom was introduced during the conquest of Mexico, and has been adopted and maintained as the machine of the predominantly male craftsman.