Works by Graciela Iturbide and Carla Fernández installed

Gelatin silver prints by Graciela Iturbide selected from the series, Los que viven en la arena (Those who live in the sand), 1979 (left) and cotton and hand-woven woolen capes made with artisan collaborators by Carla Fernández

In 1978, photographer Graciela Iturbide was invited by the Archivo Etnogr Audiovisual of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista in Mexico City to participate in an initiative in which photographers, musicians, and cinematographers doumented the cultural aspects of Mexico's various Indigenous groups. Iturbide chose to photograph the Seri (autoethnonym Comcáac), who live on the coast of the northern state of Sonora. The photographs were published in 1980 in the book Los que viven en la arena (Those Who Live in the Sand).
Under constant threat of extermination, the Seri resisted three hundred years of Spanish colonization as well as later subjugation by the Mexican State. They constitute a highly distinctive group in Mexico. Once nomadic, at the time of Iturbide's visit they remained so to a degree. They lived from fishing, although this was changing, as they had started to produce carved wooden handcrafts And, at the time, their population was so small that they were considered to be on the verge of extinction; today they currently number about one thousand. In her portraits, Iturbide captures the Seris' way of living, the effect of the desert and sea landscape on their culture, and the tension between their traditional lifestyle and their adaptation to modernization. In particular, Iturbide photographed the act of female face-painting, once part of everyday life but by then done almost exclusively for ceremonies. While documenting this practice, Iturbide had her own face painted (as shown in the self-portrait opposite), which symbolizes both her acceptance by the women of the group and her own process of transformation through this contact.

Carla Fernández is a fashion designer and historian who for the past twenty years has studied, preserved, and revitalized the textile heritage of Mexico's Indigenous communities. She is the founder of Taller Flora (Flora Workshop), a studio that includes a fashion label as well as mobile design workshops. Traveling throughout Mexico, Fernández visits hand-spinners, weavers, embroiderers, and garment makers to document their traditional techniques, which include backstrap-loom weaving, natural dyeing, embroidering, as well as geometric structuring, pleating, and folding. Working with the local communities, Taller Flora adapts and transforms some of these practices to produce new models that generate income for the producers, while recognizing their contribution. This is especially significant in Mexico, where 90 percent of the artisans are women, most of them family bread-winners living below the poverty line.
Fernández's book, The Barefoot Designer: A Handbook (2014) is a detailed archive of Mexico's rich Indigenous and mestizo textile traditions and her related work. The title pays homage to The Barefoot Architect: A Handbook for Green Building (2007) by Johan van Lengen, who traveled all over Mexico to learn how people constructed local vernacular architecture. Fernández's work is also inspired by and builds on the legacy of a previous generation of women who researched and defended Mexican Indigenous traditions, including Diana Kennedy on Mexican cooking and Mariana Yampolsky on Mexican vernacular housing.

For much wider than a line, Fernández collaborates with Mexican Indigenous communities to create ponchos, or quechquemitis, that exhibition visitors can wear. The quechquemitt--in Nahuatl quechtli means "neck" and tiaquemilf means "garment"--is clothing made from two squares folded to form triangles that cover each side of the torso. The corners of the quechquemill can be worn at the front and back, or to the sides, sloping down along the arms in the production of each garment, Fernández collaborated with different communities of artisan weavers with whom she has long-term working relationships, including the Tzotziles from San Juan Chamula, Otomis from San Pablito, Pahuatlán Puebla and El Nanthe, Hidalgo, Amuzgos from Xochsitiahuaca, Guerreros Nahuatls from Hueyapan, Puebla, and Zapotecos from Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca.

Text written by Curator Pablo León de la Barra for the exhibition catalog.