threads & patterns: living indigenous art of the americas

Unchained.Art Contemporary Gallery is hosting threads & patterns: living indigenous art of the americas, an exhibition that runs from August 14 through August 28. It's presented alongside the Center for Shamanic Education and Exchange, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that works to keep spiritual knowledge moving from elders to the next generation. The show brings together three distinct traditions from across the Americas: Wixarika yarn paintings from Mexico, Shipibo Conibo tapestries from the Peruvian Amazon, and Kogi woven gamá bags from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia.

What ties these pieces together is how the exhibition frames them. Rather than treating them as documents of a vanishing practice, the show presents them as objects of ceremony and as knowledge that's still alive and in use within their communities today. The Wixarika pieces come from the Carrillo Bautista family, whose father is a maracame—a Huichol shaman and healer. Each one is pressed into wax on wooden forms, and the artist writes by hand on the back exactly what the painting contains. The Shipibo Conibo kene designs aren't meant as decoration; they're medicinal, encoding a vibration that can be received visually as well as through icaros, the healing songs of the Ucayali River Basin. And each Kogi gamá bag is hand-woven by a Kogi Sanha—the holy women and spiritual midwives of the Kogi, who are descendants of the Tairona—and takes one full moon to complete.

It's a lot to take in at once, and the range of materials—yarn, tapestry, and woven bags—gives you a good sense of how different these traditions are, even while they're being shown together. The opening reception is Friday, August 14, from 6 to 9 PM at Unchained.Art Contemporary Gallery in Austin, and the show stays up through August 28.