Pick up a length of pánu di téra and you're holding more than cloth. You're holding a route: from the volcanic slopes of Santiago, through the hands of enslaved West African weavers in the 1500s, out along trade networks that stitched together Africa, Europe and Brazil, and into the wardrobes of a diaspora that still wears blue as memory. This is the story a new exhibition at the RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) Museum, Cloth of the Earth: Indigo, Cape Verde, and West African Knowledge, sets out to tell.
Unknown Maker, Cape Verdean, Pano d’Obra Bicho (Woman’s Shawl). Early to mid 1900's. Mary Ann Lippitt Acquisition Fund.
At its centre is Maria Tavares, a Cape Verdean educator who has spent more than thirty years building a textile collection that traces the threads between West Africa and the Cape Verdean communities of southern New England. Her father's family belongs to the Badiu communities of Santiago, descendants of enslaved Africans whose traditions survived in the island's rural interior. Tavares grew up watching women wrap pánu around their waists for carrying water, working the fields, tending children, recovering after childbirth. Cloth, in this context, is an infrastructure for a life as well as decoration.
Portrait of Maria Tavares adorned in and alongside indigo tie-resist dyed fabrics, at the Cloth of the Earth exhibition. Image courtesy of RISD
The exhibition pairs an early-1900s pano d'obra bicho (woman's shawl), woven in narrow handloom strips and joined with indigo-dyed supplementary weft-float patterning, alongside contemporary Nigerian textiles from Kano. The visual rhyme between them is deliberate. Tavares first noticed it herself, through friendships with Nigerians and repeated visits to Kano's Kofar Mata dye pits, in continuous operation since 1498.
Hausa artists, Karofi Kofar Mata Dyeing Center, 1498-present; Kano, Nigeria Indigo Cloth, ca. 1990 - 2020. Cotton plain weave; indigo tie-resist dyed. Courtesy of Maria Tavares.
In Kano, Hausa artisans still practise tie-resist dyeing by hand: cloth is wrapped, twisted or bound tight before repeated immersion in fermented indigo vats, the bindings removed afterwards to reveal starbursts and radiating circles. No measurements, no written instructions, just accumulated knowledge passed hand to hand. The spiral motifs that result carry cosmological weight in many West African traditions, standing for the cyclical movement of life itself. Tavares describes the dye vat as a living entity, one that needs feeding and tending to stay active, and indigo itself as medicine, memory and a form of connection to the earth.
Hausa artists, Karofi Kofar Mata Dyeing Center, 1498-present; Kano, Nigeria Indigo Cloth, ca. 1990 - 2020. Cotton plain weave; indigo tie-resist dyed; embroidery (on tunic). Courtesy of Maria Tavares
What makes this exhibition worth seeking out is the refusal to treat any of this as folklore frozen in the past. Kano's dye pits are working pits today. Tavares's collection is a living act of preservation, built one relationship and one journey at a time. Two coasts, one ocean of trade and displacement between them, and a colour that has carried meaning across all of it since long before anyone thought to write the history down.
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Further Information:
Cloth of the Earth: Indigo, Cape Verde, and West African Knowledge runs at the RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) Museum through March 28, 2027.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Pano d’Obra Bicho (Woman’s Shawl) (detail), early to mid 1900s. Mary Ann Lippitt Acquisition Fund. RISD Museum, Providence, RI.
All further images as credited in captions.