Member Kyle Marini researches pre-contact Andean visual culture as a Doctoral student of art history at Penn State University. Fueled by a semester abroad in Ecuador painting the landscape plein air, sculpting ceramics with native clay, and learning about the local art history, Kyle would go on to develop and explore a fascination with the textile patterns he encountered in Quito’s markets. For this month’s profile, we speak with Kyle about his academic work on the textiles of Inca past.
Kyle Marini at the Inca site of Sacsayhuamán in Cuzco, Peru
Photograph by Rodrigo Becerra Parra
Textile Society of America (TSA): Kyle, you are a painter, muralist and potter all in addition to your work with textiles! Can you would you share a bit about that intersection as well as your process and inspiration?
Kyle Marini (KM): My art historical research pulls from my background as a maker. I use interdisciplinary methods to better understand why Inca artists made works in fiber as they did. The methods I use include technical skill, archival research, and Indigenous language training. I find a technical approach useful when Andean textiles lack context from their original burial spot or written documentation (as with most examples from the pre-contact period that were not scientifically excavated) because it is object-oriented and maximizes insights offered by the best evidence at hand—the textiles themselves. When techniques are constant and continued to the present, I find ethnography also helpful, particularly with contemporary Quechua textile artists who use the same terminology to name traits of their textiles as Inca works that no longer exist but are described in early colonial sources. I study the use of such works in Inca imperial rituals to reconstruct the Inca past as it was materialized, remembered, and re-accessed through hands-on textile projects. These projects give us a novel take on Inca history through experiential practice—a means by which we may overcome obstacles of colonial erasure to see this region’s culture history as Inca artists intended. My dissertation focuses on the ritual processes that made a textile a portrait of a particular Inca emperor, building upon a foundation laid by the growing number of art historians who reimagine the Inca polity so renowned for its textile production.
TSA: What is your first textile memory?
KM: I really don’t remember a time of being acutely “aware” of textiles until my undergraduate study abroad trip to Quito, Ecuador in the fall of 2016. I really enjoyed frequenting artisanal markets where I became particularly intrigued by textiles for sale. I was so curious to know the meanings behind their patterns and whether those patterns stemmed from Inca precedents or were entirely new innovations. That experience influenced my honor’s thesis on Inca textiles and ultimately led me to where I am now as a Ph.D. student of Andean art history with a material focus on textiles and fiber arts. I found that/believe textiles have a sort of magnetic force that appeals to basic human sensibilities—they so captivated me that I had to learn how to weave and study various Quechuan languages to learn about their production processes in the field!
TSA: Does your work tend to reflect a communal process or more of an individual practice (or both)?
KM: Academia, and art history as a discipline, skew toward valuing individual merit over collaborative effort—however, I think the situation is changing and communal interests are being given more equitable treatment. That said, I have sought collaboration mostly outside of the confines of my academic work. For example, last year I produced and exhibited a traveling solo exhibition titled America’s Social Fibers: Mobility and Migration in the Western Hemisphere Before 1492. The exhibition was essentially didactic and focused on the uses of fiber works for the imperial strategies of the Aztec and Inca empires. To communicate my academic research to a more general audience I made scaled replicas of well-known fiber works that facilitated and documented these culture’s imperial expansions, from a twenty-foot Inca suspension bridge to an Aztec painted amate paper codex. The exhibition traveled to four very different venues, beginning in my hometown nonprofit art gallery, then to my art history department, then a State College non-profit creative space, and finally to a local Museum. At each site I saw a new opportunity to connect with a community and seek collaborative opportunities. For the final showing at the Bellefonte Art Museum, I collaborated with a colleague who founded a non-profit textile organization in Cuzco, Peru called Mosqoy. This organization supports sustainable textile production in the surrounding Cuzco region by sponsoring young women to attend school in the city and selling their textile products on their behalf so they do not have to sacrifice communal, textile-based education for Western forms of education. She sent a box of textiles made in rural communities in the surrounding Cuzco area so I could sell them at the Museum while my exhibition was on view. They priced the textiles to cover the international shipping costs and the Museum agreed to sell the textiles with no commission fee so that 100% of the proceeds could go directly to the weaving communities. The best part of the experience was when I visited Mosqoy in Cuzco last summer while conducting research and discovered that the organization’s representative I worked with to receive the textiles is related to a colleague in a History of Fashion course I took the previous semester at Penn State! I realized just how textiles really do knit this small world together!
1/6 reduced size model of the Q’eswachaka suspension bridge annually remade in the province of Cuzco, Peru. The surviving Inca-style bridge is made of ichu grass beaten, spun, plied, and doubled into supports with cordage of the same material tied to enclose the main supports, with a lining of tree branches to stabilize the walking platform. Kyle’s replica here is made of hemp rope and maple tree branches, spanning a mere 20 feet of the 120-foot length of the original bridge.
TSA: Do you have any textile-related books / resources that you particularly recommend?
KM: There are so many books I would be thrilled to recommend based on individual interests! For example, conservators and curators will find Irene Emery’s The Primary Structures of Fabric (1966) integral to assessment of the single element or woven structures of textiles in their collections. The enormous Tejidos milenarios del Perú (Ancient Peruvian Textiles) (1999) is a great reference source that contains images of textiles from the Early Horizon to the viceregal period with essays on construction techniques. For more targeted interests in a specific Andean culture or period, there are plenty of dissertations and monographs on textiles from various archaeological sites. There are also many ethnographies that provide detailed information about current Andean weaving practices. Adele Cahlander and Marjorie Cason’s The Art of Bolivian Highland Weaving (1976) is an excellent resource for artists more focused on technical processes and it taught me many of the warp-faced weaving skills I am now versed in. More recent art historical publications that I find useful as I develop my own research methodology are Andrew Hamilton’s Scale and the Incas (2018) and Lisa Trever’s Image Encounters: Moche Murals and Archaeo Art History (2022). Both feature textiles throughout and each is a significant contribution to object-oriented reconstructions of past Andean viewer experience and interaction with artworks. A monograph now available for my field that I regularly consult as a reference source is Maya Stanfield-Mazzi’s Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520-1820 (2021). Finally, a very interesting read outside of my field geared toward art historians, fashion experts, and gender studies is Timothy McCall’s Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy (2022). Hopefully I have suggested something of interest for every reader! I am very happy to suggest more sources and receive reader suggestions in return!
A replica of a cotton knotted fish net with avian imagery similar to nets with zoomorphic imagery found on the arid south coast of Peru. This imagery has been interpreted as some of the earliest evidence of religious ideology and is particularly noteworthy of the population boom at the site of Huaca Prieta (ca. 2500 BCE) where local fibers were worked into nets to procure enough marine resources to sustain a large-scale society before the advent of intensive agriculture. 5.5’ x 8’, tan and white cotton rope.
To-size replica of the Aztec Codex Borotuni, likely produced or completed in the early colonial period, post-1521. Amatl paper and ink.
TSA: And finally, what projects are you currently working on / looking forward to?
KM: I just represented Penn State’s department of Art History at the Middle Atlantic Symposium in the History of Art at the National Gallery from March 3-4. There, I presented a paper about two colonial Inca tunics without absolute dating to discern which of the two was the original “invention” and which was the later “innovation.” All said, this project was exciting because it resulted from on-site research I conducted last summer in Cuzco with the lesser studied of these tunics, coupled with the slow-pace of archival research in Seville. I ultimately proposed a revised date of attribution for the embroidery in both tunics, suggesting they be considered as products of the century preceding their currently held production date. The paper makes a case in point to genuinely consider the longevity of pre-contact Inca design and religious practices even after the advent of European artistic conventions and spiritual conversion. I think the project modeled an approach applicable to various fields in art history faced with reminiscent works habitually treated as interchangeable because of image reproduction and side-by-side comparison that tend to emphasize similarities over differences and thereby “flatten” works individually. A recording of the paper can be viewed HERE or through the at the symposium’s website
An Andean-style backstrap loom, fashioned so the heading cord could be removed from the upper and lower extremities and the finished cloth freed from the loom to retain its four selvages. It is warp-faced and features a wave pattern produced by warp-floats. 8” x 12”, cotton warp yarns, continuous alpaca weft yarn, and wooden rods.
Kyle Marini is a Ph.D. Candidate of Art History at Penn State University. He is writing a dissertation on Inca portraiture that will show how public rituals crafted portrayals of Inca emperors in artworks such as textiles that bore no overt resemblance to their physical likeness. Kyle centers on Inca representation as a case study to explain the conceptual jump between a human subject and material representation, a process elided by extant definitions of portraiture that forces a reevaluation of Western genres of artistic production. He has received four FLAS fellowships to study two Quechuan languages, the lingua franca of the Inca Empire, to incorporate linguistic methods into his project’s Indigenous-oriented theoretical framework.
ALL IMAGES OF WORKS CREATED IN KYLE’S 2021-2022 TRAVELING SOLO TEXTILE EXHIBITION
WEBSITE:
www.kylemarini.com
INSTAGRAM:
https://www.instagram.com/cafekyle/
TWITTER:
https://twitter.com/CafeKyleMarini
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