Lecturer Shares Textile Traditions Across Indigenous Americas, Oct. 5

MELBOURNE, FLA.—Florida Institute of Technology will host a talk in the Friends of Textiles Lecture Series on Oct. 5 at 6 p.m. in the Denius Student Center’s Hartley Room. The lecture, titled, “Textiles: Living and Dyeing in the Indigenous Americas,” focuses on the importance and influence of textiles on the ancient and modern culture of the indigenous people of Central and South America.

Guest speaker Laura Wingfield will discuss textile traditions across the indigenous Americas. She will take the audience from the earliest finds in Guitarrero Cave in the Andes, dating to 8600 BCE, through the rise of the primacy of textiles throughout the Andes, Central America, and Mesoamerica.

Today, modern indigenous people from Mexico to Peru continue ancient spinning, dyeing, and weaving traditions and belief systems based on the importance of textiles. She will also share some of these current practices from Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Peru.

Wingfield received master’s and doctoral degrees in art history from Emory University in Atlanta, specializing in the art of the ancient Americas. She has presented many talks and published several articles on Central American art, dress and culture.A curator of exhibits at Emory University’s Carlos Museum, she is also the author of the forthcoming catalogue, The World of the Seed, Vol. 1: Ancient Art from Southwestern Nicaragua and Northwestern Costa Rica in the Denver Art Museum and Jan and Frederick R. Mayer Collection.

Tickets are $10 each for the general public; the lecture is free to Friends of Textiles members and full-time students. For more information, visit http://textiles.fit.edu or contact the Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts at (321) 674-8313.