Weaving a World: Textiles and the Navajo Way of Seeing [SOLD]

This superlative and beautifully written and illustrated text details the formal and conceptual issues within the Navajo textile arts. Working with the collection of the Laboratory of Anthropology and Navajo elders from the eastern Reservation, the author uncovers previously untold links between Navajo culture, religious life, and the textile arts of the Navajo people.

From the Back of the Book:

Navajo waving has long been admired for its technique and craftsmanship, but it is conceptual art as well, with much to say about the people who produce it. Authors Willink and Zolbrod approach these extraordinary textiles as a careful reader would a work of literature, attentive for clues that offer context and reveal meaning. Working with elders of the Navajo Reservation in eastern New Mexico and studying the exemplary textile collection housed in the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, Willink and Zolbrod discover remarkable links between Navajo culture and the symbols and meaningful techniques contained in the textiles. Weaving is a sacred art, embodying prayers and ceremony, the collective creation stories and the mythic and historical past. In weaving, the individual contributors to the whole of her culture, preserving honzo, the concept that combines order, beauty, balance, and harmony. A fundamental reality is textured into a Navajo rug. It carries ancient thought and tradition and it an expression of history and poetry carefully structured to express a distinct sense of past, present, and future.