Word: navajos
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Blanket weaving as serious art? Once the staple of the trading-post tourist trade, the best of Navajo blankets have gone on display in Los Angeles and receive a critical look in this week's Art section. As for fashions of a more modern weave, the Modern Living section's Shirley Rigby took the measure of the new popularity of palazzo pants for a story on baggy trousers...
...Navajo blanket-mostly in the form of machine-made imitations-has long been a popular product for the tourist trade. Brightly colored, durable, it will serve to cover a grand piano or enliven a teen-ager's den. Only in recent years has it become apparent that the Navajos are a tribe of unusual vitality, and that the blankets they made during the 19th century express a remarkable artistic spirit...
...illustrate that spirit, Los Angeles Sculptor Anthony Berlant and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, curator of textiles and costumes at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, have brought together 81 strikingly beautiful Navajo blankets from public and private collections-including those of such artists as Jasper Johns, Georgia O'Keeffe and Frank Stella. This comprehensive exhibit of Navajo weaving has spent most of the summer in Los Angeles and will open later this month at the Brooklyn Museum, then moving on to Rice University, Kansas City and Hamburg, West Germany...
Magic. A nomadic tribe of warriors, the Navajos called themselves the Dineh ("People of the Earth"). In the middle of the 16th century, they migrated from what is now northwestern Canada to the American Southwest. There they first encountered horses and sheep-both brought to the New World by Spanish conquistadors. While the Navajo men hunted and raided, the women learned weaving from the tribe's more peaceful neighbors-and frequent victims-the Pueblos. At first they copied Pueblo styles, but they soon developed their own. As early as 1795, Governor Fernando Chacón observed that "they work...
Weaving was partly a religious ritual, accompanied by solemn chants. "Spider Woman instructed the Navajo women how to weave on a loom that Spider Man told them how to make," according to a Navajo legend. "The crosspoles were made of sky and earth cords, the warp sticks of sun rays, the healds of crystal and lightning...