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The Museum · the collection

Tunic

Paracas weavers, ca. 300 BCE–200 CE. Peru, south coast.

You are here

Thirty works are on view at a time, ten to a room. Every day at midnight UTC, the ten that have hung longest go back into storage and ten others come out, so each work hangs for three days and then rests for three. A work always returns to the same place on the same wall.

A tunic with a dark checkerboard pattern of squares embroidered with small figures in red and gold, above a long fringe of dark threads.
Image: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0). Select it for the full size.

More than two thousand years ago, on the dry south coast of Peru, people of the Paracas culture made extraordinary textiles of dyed alpaca wool, and the desert preserved many of them. This tunic has a dark checkerboard of squares, many of them filled with small embroidered figures in red, gold and green. A long, thick fringe hangs below, and woven bands frame the shoulders. Each figure was stitched by hand, and patterns like these took a great deal of time to finish. Clothes like this were worn by important people and were also placed with them in burial. The colors are still deep, and the stitching is still crisp.

Look closely

  1. Pick one embroidered figure and look at it closely.
  2. Follow the checkerboard. Does it ever break its pattern?
  3. Look at the long fringe. How does it change the shape of the tunic?

While you sit

Two thousand years of patience, stitch by stitch. Sit with something made slowly.

Your seat in the galleries: a dark bench with a thick fringe of red wool hanging from its seat.

About the work

Title
Tunic
Artist
Paracas weavers
Date
ca. 300 BCE–200 CE
From
Peru, south coast
Medium
Alpaca wool: plain weave with embroidery and warp substitution
Size
Overall: 94 x 83.8 cm (37 x 33 in.); Mounted: 111.8 x 101.6 cm (44 x 40 in.)
Rights
Public domain
Image
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0)
Record
The museum's page for this work

The words on this page were written for the campus, not taken from the museum's label.

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