AMANO BIRDS AND FEATHERS

The exhibition shows the best pieces with birds designs and featherwork in the Amano Precolumbian Textile Museum collection, showing ceramic potteries with examples of how different cultures represented birds, their feathers and diverse ornaments and artworks created with feathers.

This complex culture occupied the south coast of Peru; it reached an exquisite handling of textiles, representing its goods, many of which were birds. The featherwork for this stage is scarce but of great artistic quality.

This culture, heir to Paracas, had a deep connection with birds and feathers, favorite ornaments of nobles and priests.

The great Wari empire in the Peruvian highlands probably started as a commercial bridge between different societies. With time and its economy benefitting from seasonal climatic changes, it managed to develop and establish alliances with nearby towns, starting a fast growth, to extend its identity and customs to quite distant towns, such as Nasca, Mochica and Cajamarca.

This village of skillful craftsmen developed on the central coast of Peru, in alliance with other important kingdoms such as Chimú. With the appearance and growth of the Inca Empire, this culture was reached and voluntarily submitted to the power of the Incas, maintaining its identity and prestige as a society of skilful weavers.

Feather art that we can appreciate in different cultures, shows two means of obtaining feathers, one corresponds to the hunting of some local birds of beautiful and small feathers. The other means of production tells us of trade at great distances, where Amazonian birds were bred to provide feathers for a long time or were dyed to generate new shades of color. Some of the recognizable feathers come from flamingos, macaws and parrots, hummingbirds, wild ducks, American native herons and seabirds.

After the time of the Inca empire, with the arrival of the conquistadors and the transformation of the American world, cultural shock also affected the production of diversity of feather ornaments, as well as their integration into popular culture; it no longer exists as a tradition today. The use of feathers persists only in its most original form in the crowns of the chiefs in the Amazonian communities or in traditional dances of some communities, where they are only used in special private dances.