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This textile
collection was purchased by myself, Sarasvati Ishaya
(previously known as Paula Glassmoyer) and Eddie L.
Green in Guatemala from 1984-85.
For 20 odd
years, I have kept the collection in storage in
various places in the United States, including Miami,
Michigan, New York and North Carolina: representing
hundred of hours of boxing, folding, mothballing,
cataloging, tagging, driving, flying and yes, getting
through customs.
The first
digital catalog was
put together with the help of Brahmananda Ishaya in 1999
in Brewster, NY at the home of Joy and Santo Longo.
In December
of 2007 I hired David Gellatly to professionally
photograph the collection in its entirety,
subsequently my webmaster, Judith Gadd, put the catalog information and photographs
on the internet.
All this was
done for two purposes, first, to sell
the textiles themselves as artifacts. Please see the
entire collection in the
five slide shows on this page.
The second
purpose is to sell
the photographs as art. You may view these
spectacular details of the textiles at
Photographs as Art
and order copies through SmugMug.
The majority
of the pieces are from the Cuchumatane mountain region
of Guatemala and constitute an excellent view into Mayan
weaving technology, cosmology and culture.
Over the last
few generations the culture that produced these textiles
has been so pulled apart by capitalism and war that the
possibility of Guatemala producing weavings like this no
longer exists. However unfortunate, that political
reality is one of the factors that make this
collection so valuable.
All the
information about the textiles in this catalog was
gathered through countless hours of conversation with
weavers, dealers, and friends who are direct descendants
of the Mayan people. Eddie and I had a few American
collector friends with whom we’d gather and share data
on weaving, but principally the information contained in
this report is from indigenous sources.
The company
Eddie and I kept was my training ground. As a result of
hours of listening to indigenous people tell old stories
from their culture and observing dealers, shop keepers
or market vendors describing weavings: buying a piece of
textile art quickly became a task structured along the
lines of design elements, use, composition, fabric
content, dyes, and the condition and age of a piece.
Design
elements hold a lot of information proper to the Mayan
civilization. I heard many references to a certain
“bird” of antiquity called Kot. Kot was said to swoop
down out of the sky and abduct people. But oddly enough
in all the stories I heard about Kot, never once was Kot
depicted as an evil character. My intuition about Kot is
that the “bird” represents an interplanetary vehicle
occupied by intelligent, friendly beings closely
associated with the Mayan people of antiquity. The
theory is not too much of a stretch considering the
plentiful evidence of higher mind in just about every
aspect of Mayan civilization. Kot is a nearly ubiquitous
design theme on older pieces of Mayan textile art: all
antique ceremonial garments contain Kot. Kot is
obviously a symbol of great significance, and hence the
name of the s collection.
Use pertains
to the functional category the piece belongs to: rebozo
(shawl), huipil (woman’s blouse), cinta (belt) etc.
Guatemalan traditional dress is made either for daily or ceremonial use. Ceremonial
pieces are indicated as Cofradia. The Cofradia in
Guatemala is a fraternal organization, sanctioned by the
Roman Catholic Church, composed of indigenous men to
keep Mayan religious and cultural traditions alive.
Composition
indicates how the design was achieved. In Mayan weaving
technology there are two principal means of creating a
design. It is either brocaded into a base cloth
or it is jaspeado. Jaspe designs are pre-dyed into the
warp threads, then when the weft is added the design
automatically displays itself. In Mayan culture men dye
the threads and women weave the cloth.
Fabric
content identifies the fabric as silk, cotton, wool,
articela (rayon), lustrina (synthetic thread that looks
much like silk). Ixcaco is a naturally occurring brown
cotton. Older ixcaco is soft and light, modern is
rougher and darker.
Dyes are such
as indigo, rojo aleman (a distinct, popular red),
cochineal (a red from a bug), morado criollo (a purple from a conch
shell off the coast of Honduras), and cimento (a pastel
lime green used in the dying of silk).
Both age and
condition determine value. The longer a piece survives
in good condition, of course, the more valuable it
becomes.
This
collection well represents everything that goes into
making weavings valuable: designs that represent Mayan
ideas and legend, expensive and rare threads, pieces
that are well preserved, natural and unusual colors,
jaspe and other remarkable weaving technology. It’s all
these elements and the fact Guatemala no longer produces
textiles of this caliber, that establishes the artistic
and historic value of this collection.
Thank you for
your interest in the Kot Collection.
Sarasvati
Ishaya
January 2008,
Durham, NC |
