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...
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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.