In a New York studio in 1965, Leslie Tillett (1915-1992) began sketching scenes he'd carry south to Mexico, where embroiderers would spend the next twelve years turning his drawings into a hundred feet of stitched cotton. The result, now held by the Denver Art Museum, sits at the heart of Ink & Thread: Codices and the Art of Storytelling, an exhibition that treats cloth as a language in its own right.
The show takes its cue from Mesoamerican painter-scribes, whose codices recorded history, genealogy and prophecy long before the Spanish arrived. In Nahuatl and Classic Maya, writing and drawing shared a single word, tlàcuiloa and dz'iib' respectively, because for these cultures the two acts were inseparable. Codices weren't flat records either. Interpreters brought them into three dimensions through performance, using costume, staging and music to animate the page for their communities.
Codex Borgia, produced in the sixteenth century before the arrival of the Spanish by the Nahutal-speaking Tlaxcaltec, Mixtec, or Cholulteca people, details the different aspects of the Central Mexican calendar, tonalpohualli. Seen here is page 71 of the manuscript dominated by the sun god Tonatiuh.
Most of that library was lost. Catholic priests burned the majority of pre-Hispanic codices as idolatrous, and only a handful survive from before 1521. What followed instead was a colonial hybrid: some four hundred manuscripts produced under Spanish patronage or, in several striking cases, drawn by Indigenous artists as legal evidence in land disputes against the crown. Beyond the Mexica and Maya, painter-scribes among the Mixtec, Zapotec, Tlaxcalteca, Purépecha and Otomí all developed their own regional variations on this pictorial script, each with distinct conventions for rendering place, lineage and event.
Leslie Tillett, La Malinche Translates for Offerings, 1972-1976. Acrylic and watercolor on paper; 8 3/4 x 12 3/4 in. Denver Art Museum: Gift of Seth Tillett and Nicole Rauscher, 2023.578. © Estate of Leslie Tillett
Tillett's tapiz picks up that visual grammar centuries later, though his own route to it began unexpectedly. He and his brother Charles first started designing printed textiles using handspun cotton in Taxco, a town then drawing American and Mexican artists to William Spratling's silverworking community, among them Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Trained as a textile designer rather than a painter, Tillett felt drawn to cloth over canvas and modelled his structure on the Bayeux Tapestry, dividing the work into three registers with captions in Spanish and English framing the action above and below.
Tillett Tapestry of the Conquest of Mexico (Detail), 1965-1977
He drew directly from sources like the Florentine Codex and the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, and his friendship with Rivera, whose conquest murals he toured in Cuernavaca, shaped how he staged the narrative in thread. Look closely at the surface and you can trace individual embroiderers' choices: one stitching grass as an inverted V, another favouring straight verticals or loose undulating lines. Because the museum can only display sections of the piece at once, they've built an app so visitors can scroll its full length digitally.
Tillett Tapestry of the Conquest of Mexico (Detail), 1965-1977
Contemporary artist Enrique Chagoya extends this lineage into the present. Printed on amate paper at Shark's Press in Colorado, his codices borrow the format's satirical edge, folding superheroes into stories of conquest and survival, joined in the gallery by graphic work from Eric Garcia.
Together, these works make the case that codices were, and remain, both history and a technology for holding memory in visible form.
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Further Information:
Ink & Thread: Codices and the Art of Storytelling is on view at the Denver Art Museum until October 4, 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Tillett Tapestry of the Conquest of Mexico, 1965-1977. Hand embroidered silk on cotton cloth (manta). Height: 71.12 cm; Length: 32.3088 m
All further images as credited in captions.