Huipil c. 20th century

This Huipil, whose maker is unknown, is at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and looks like it was made with some kind of cotton. The embroidery is amazing. I mean, look at the detail of these repeating patterns. The materiality of the embroidery is key. We can imagine the textile artist’s hand moving deliberately across the fabric, each stitch building up the overall image. It makes me think of Agnes Martin's grids, but more playful. I love that the colours are limited to a few reds, yellows and blues. And that the structure is created from a simple matrix of dots. The overall effect is less about perfection than about the beauty of the imperfect gesture. There’s something kind of wonderful about how folk art embraces ambiguity. The edges are rough, the colours bleed. It reminds us that art is not about answers, but about the pleasure of looking, and thinking.