Yarn Paintings by Mexico’s Wixárika Masters

Based in the Sierra Madre Occidental highlands of northwestern Mexico, Indigenous Wixárika people traditionally pressed yarn and other small objects (beads, corn kernels, coins and small mirrors) onto beeswax-smeared rough-cut disks of wood and inside gourd bowls to create symbolic imagery on devotional offerings to their ancestral nature deities. Starting in the 1940s, Mexican government agents encouraged the use of commercial plywood to expand the format, thus launching a new art genre called tablas de estambre or “yarn paintings.” None were sacred objects, most were produced as colorful decorative works for arts-and-crafts markets, and—in some cases—they were purposefully created to preserve oral histories and myths, and/or depict the artists’ individual religious experiences and visions. The five works displayed in this exhibition were created by three master Wixárika artists José Benítez Sánchez, Guadalupe González Ríos, and Juan Ríos Martínez.

This exhibition is presented in coordination with the Radford University Art Museum’s current display of forty-six works by Wixárika yarn painting masters from the museum’s Kolla-Landwehr Foundation Collection.