Huichol Bead and Yarn Art | Mingei International Museum

Gallery Closure: Our Exhibitions Level is closed until Saturday, April 5. Learn more about upcoming exhibitions

Pintura de Estambre (detail), unidentified maker, Huichol culture, 20th century, San Andres, Nayarit, Mexico, yarb, beeswax. Collection Mingei International Museum. Gift of Mayde Meyers Herberg. Photo by Lynton Gardiner. 2002-81-037
Image: Pintura de Estambre (detail), unidentified maker, Huichol culture, 20th century, San Andres, Nayarit, Mexico, yarb, beeswax. Collection Mingei International Museum. Gift of Mayde Meyers Herberg. Photo by Lynton Gardiner. 2002-81-037
On View

Apr 5, 2008 - Jun 30, 2010

Curated By

Rob Sidner

The exhibition was funded in part by The County of San Diego Community Enhancement Program.

A continuing exhibition from Mingei International Museum’s permanent collection, featuring the work of a family of Huichol Indians. Rosendo Carrillo de la Rosa and his wife, son and brother-in-law, from the Sierra Madre Occidental in the Mexican State of Jalisco, have twice demonstrated the Huichol art of beading at Mingei International Museum—first at the Museum in Balboa Park in 1997 where they covered a globe with small glass seed beads and then in Escondido in 2003 where they spent two weeks transforming a faded carousel horse into a new work of art. Wearing traditional dress, the family worked together, applying beeswax to the area to be decorated, then pressing colorful beads into the wax to create traditional sacred designs and patterns.

The Museum also has in its collection a significant Huichol yarn painting depicting the Huichol cosmology. Just as in the making of beaded objects, wax is used to attach colored yarn to the form intended—prayer bowls, masks, carved wooden animals and paintings, the term used when the yarn decorates a flat surface.