The Finer Things
Crafted for special ceremonies among the Diné people, dress panels are more than works of art, they’re a lasting part of material culture.
Crafted for special ceremonies among the Diné people, dress panels are more than works of art, they’re a lasting part of material culture.
Navajo Classic woman’s dress panel, ca. 1850, vegetal indigo, 50/50 lac and cochineal dyes, 48 x 33½"
Two separately woven dress panels—mirror images of one another—are joined together at the sides, leaving room for the arms to come through, then held together with a woven sash. This is the traditional two-piece Navajo women’s dress, called biil. These expertly crafted textiles feature the classic designs of Navajo (Diné) basketry, characterized with colors of indigo blue and rich reds derived from cochineal or lac, and a dark brown center. The mirrored design of the two panels makes it so that when the garment is worn, the same design is displayed on either side. This style of Navajo dress signifies something special—they are one of the many threads in an illustrious tapestry of history, culture and tradition for the Diné, meaning “The People” in the Navajo language.
Four authentic Navajo dress panels and one manta (a wider-than-long textile worn as a blanket or wraparound dress) are on exhibit at Shiprock Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, until spring of this year. The panels all span from the 1850s to 1860s, around the time New Mexico became a United States territory. According to the gallery, “They represent some of the earliest examples of Navajo weaving that the gallery has had on display...the simplicity of design with only two panels of horizontal banding helps to highlight the fineness of the weaving. Because the weavers were making these for themselves to wear, they really spent the time to make them as fine as possible.”
“The weavers took it as a chance to show off their skill, and there’s a couple of reasons for that,” says Paul Elmore, Shiprock Santa Fe gallery director. “These pieces would have been worn for special occasions, for ceremonies. This was their finest clothing.” Elmore points out that all of the panels in the exhibition are missing their mirrored counterparts. “There’s a lot of reasons that they could have gotten separated from their set. In this case, they were probably collected before they got worn, or were separated over the course of history. Even rarer than finding an 1850s dress panel is to find the set. It’s not unusual to find them today as single panels.”
Joyce Begay-foss (Diné), the recently retired director of education at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, explains that dress panels were indeed created and worn for significant occasions, specifically
that of the Kinaaldá, a coming of age ceremony among Navajo girls. Begay-foss has been a weaver for most of her life, creating custom rugs and saddle blankets that are handwoven on vertical looms from customspun Navajo churro wool. “The woman’s dress is part of the Classic Navajo Period, woven for our young girls. The patterns were taken from our early baskets, so the geometric shapes were derived from our basketry,” she says. Begay-foss delves into the history of dress panels and when the creation of these textiles primarily took place. “That time period is when we were in Bosque Redondo, 1863 to 1868, so even though it was what was called the Classic Period, these were woven during a time when we were in captivity.” She continues, “It’s important because it’s part of our culture and history. We have specific traditional meaning behind these designs and color preferences.”
Originally the only colors said to have been incorporated in the Navajo dress were black (from that of an over-dyed natural dark wool) and a very dark indigo, according to Chris Ferguson of Tres Estrellas Gallery in Taos, New Mexico. Trade cloth was introduced through the Spanish and was known in the American Southwest as red “bayeta” trade cloth. The cloth was originally dyed with cochineal, “and in the mid-19th century, lac dyes appeared along with cochineal in English woven baize trade cloth…it had long been the custom to gift or trade or treat red cloth to Native American groups. Red being one of the most elusive permanent colors in nature made it the most desirable,” Ferguson explains. “When the Navajo obtained red trade cloth, they simply unraveled it, then wet the crimped resulting threads, wound them on a spindle and let them dry to straighten
the fibers. These were then re-spun and utilized in blanket weaving. Today we call this red material ‘raveled bayeta’ when it appears in Navajo weaving. It is recognizable by its conspicuously finer strands than typical fine handspun yarns.”
Begay-foss explains that indications of the unraveling and re-spinning of red trade cloth to match the weight of the other fibers in the textile is one of the ways collectors can discern if they’re looking at an authentic, early dress panel. In addition, the handspun, single twist also indicates an early textile. “If it’s [more than two-ply], other than the bayeta, then we know its commercial, from the 1890s to 1900s—that it’s not that early. For that fine of a textile, you have to have a single ply,” she says. “It’s amazing how they could find [cloth] that fine and be consistent.”
All unique to the weavers themselves, the designs created in these textiles—while drawing from years of tradition in pattern-making—are just as much an indication of the skill of the artist as they are an individual sense of creativity and pride for one’s craft and culture. Elmore adds, “Being a weaver means being a person who can create something that has value. Making your own dress was a way of showing off how skilled you were as a weaver, so they spent extra time making these extremely fine.”
The exhibition at Shiprock Santa Fe went up in December of 2019. The panels, owned by Shiprock gallery owners Jed and Samantha Foutz, are available for collectors to purchase. Elmore says they saw it as a wonderful opportunity to show these rare textiles side by side in a one-wall installation. “You don’t see a lot of textiles pre-1870,” Elmore says. “Even today’s dresses made in acrylic yarn still adhere to the basic design and composition of the 1850s. So, what we get to see with these early panels are the beginnings of that tradition, but we’re still far away from the true beginning.”
“It’s not just art, it’s material culture,” says Begayfoss. “These things are important to us. To our culture. I want to make sure our children learn the cultural meaning behind what we do. Why we weave.”