Mexican Wool Weavings: Navajo Storm Pattern + Related Design, Saltillo Revival

Latin America, Mexico. A pair of Mexican wool weavings produced in the Saltillo revival tradition, each interpreting Navajo design vocabularies for the mid-century Southwestern market. Woven on treadle looms in handspun and commercially dyed wool, the textiles testify to a long current of cross-border exchange, in which Mexican weavers absorbed and returned the visual language Navajo artisans had themselves once borrowed from the Saltillo sarape a century prior. The first weaving renders the Navajo Storm Pattern, popularized around 1900 through the Crystal Trading Post and read in Navajo cosmology as a meeting of the sacred mountains, the central hogan, and the four winds. A rectangular center anchors the gray field, tethered by stepped lines to four corner squares, with stylized water bugs and lightning arrows populating the interior. A serrated black and ivory border flickers along the edge. Palette of dove gray, ivory, charcoal, and oxidized red. The second departs from Storm Pattern and deploys a Saltillo-descended banded composition: a commanding central serrated diamond, eyed in ivory and ringed in red and brown chevrons, presides over two smaller satellite lozenges on a tan ground. Horizontal registers of madder red, ivory, and umber stripe the field, terminating in plied corner tassels in the Mexican manner. The cadence is that of the sarape, the diamond vocabulary a clear homage to Navajo central-medallion traditions. Together, the lot offers a compact study in the migratory life of design across the United States-Mexico border, where motifs travel faster than the looms that carry them. Item # 201814

Estimate:$200

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