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.
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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.