Painted in Peru, from Prisoners to the Passion 

Sometimes the more you love museums, the less time you spend in their galleries. I’ve yet to have a proper visit to the American Museum of Natural History’s incredible halls filled with asteroids, insects, and dinosaurs, but I have spent half a day in its textiles study room, deep in the labyrinth of its collections storage. Mary Lou Murillo, Senior Museum Specialist in Textiles at the AMNH, kindly received Michelle Rich, The Ellen and Harry S. Parker III Associate Curator of Indigenous American Art at the DMA; Astrid Runggaldier, Associate Professor of Instruction, Art History, at UT Austin; and me for a research visit last May. Our goal was to get up close and personal with two Peruvian artworks that closely resemble works in the DMA’s collection: one a colonial-era Passion cloth from the Chachapoyas region (Fig. 1) and the other a fragment of a giant ancient cloth called the Prisoner Textile (Fig. 2). 

_{^{Figure 1. Lenten Curtain, 18th century. Unknown Chachapoya artist(s). Chachapoyas region, Peru. Cotton and dyes. 40.1/2291. Courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History.}} 

_{^{Figure 2. Prisoner Textile, about 1300–1401. Unknown Chimú artists. North Coast, Peru. Cotton and dyes. 41.2/710. Courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History.}} 

Michelle and I had been eyeing Passion cloths and Prisoner Textile fragments for two reasons. The first was that in early 2025, the DMA accepted the gift of a Passion cloth (Fig. 3), joining a very similar example already in the collection (Fig. 4). The other reason was the development of the DMA’s newest exhibition, Creatures and Captives: Painted Textiles of the Ancient Andes, on view September 21, 2025, to February 22, 2026. The exhibition highlights the DMA’s robust collection of dye-painted Andean textiles and brings together two fragments of the monumental Prisoner Textile, one from the DMA (Fig. 5) and the other from the Menil Collection in Houston. 

^{_{Figure 4. Passion Cloth with Crucifixion, probably 18th century. Unknown Chachapoya artist(s). Chachapoyas region, Peru. Cotton and dyes. Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Duncan E. Boeckman, 1990.149.FA.}} 

After finding the correct entrance, snapping a photo for our visitor name tags, and spending a moment with a bronze Teddy Roosevelt in the lobby, we were joined by Mary Lou. She led us past the Cretaceous plants, the Museum’s graduate school classrooms, and the ceramic antiquities, which were too numerous to be anywhere but in storage cabinets. We arrived at the textile study space, where the Passion cloth and Prisoner Textile were laid out for viewing.  

As soon as our laptops and notebooks were ready, we dove into the work we’d planned: noticing. It seems like a strange task, just noticing—but such is art history. Artworks and artifacts are historical documents, ones that need patience, close attention, and context to be read. Bit by bit, as we looked and noticed and jotted notes, the textiles told us some of their stories (Fig. 6 and 7). On the Passion cloth, we saw evidence that Indigenous Chachapoya hands had woven the fabric and painted the biblical scene. Three panels of plain-weave cotton textile measuring 29 inches each were sewn together to make the approximately 7-by-7-foot curtain, hinting at the width of the 18th-century weaver’s loom. The zigzagging geometric borders painted on either side of the Crucifixion resemble elements of the two curtains in Dallas. Historian Maya Stanfield-Mazzi argues this motif is a continuation of ancient, sacred geometry seen on Chachapoya art and architecture (2021). 

_{^{Figure 6. Michelle Rich, Hayden Juroska, and Mary Lou Murillo study the AMNH’s Lenten curtain (40.1/2291). Photo by Astrid Runggaldier.}} 

_{^{Figure 7. Astrid Runggaldier and Michelle Rich point out details of the AMNH’s Prisoner Textile fragment (41.2/710). Photo by the author.}} 

Examining the AMNH’s Prisoner Textile fragment, we saw the work of many Chimú hands. While it was once speculated that the designs were stamped on, closer looking finds that indigo dye was used to draw the outlines of the snakes, foxes, and prisoners before they were painted in with the rest of the natural colors. This must have been a fairly quick job done by multiple artists, given some of the mistakes made. One painter may have been overzealous with their work on a line of two-headed snakes, not noticing that they had sketched in indigo one serpent too many (Fig. 8). What resulted was just one head of the snake and part of its neck dyed brown, with the rest of the body a ghostly remnant under the linear border. 

^{Figure 8. Detail of the AMNH’s Prisoner Textile fragment (41.2/710). Photo by the author.} 

We spent hours in that textile study room. In telling us their stories, the two artworks also helped us better understand their counterparts at the Dallas Museum of Art. As we exited down the grand steps of the historic museum, we buzzed with new knowledge and the realization that our dry eyes hadn’t blinked all that much that morning. It’s a great privilege to spend time with old textiles—not only because they spend most of their time hidden away from potential light damage, but also because they have managed to stand the test of time over hundreds of years. Creatures and Captives: Painted Textiles of the Ancient Andes is on view in the DMA’s third floor textile gallery, where visitors can spend as much time noticing as they like. 

Hayden Juroska is the Research Assistant for Indigenous American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. 

____________________________

Citations and Further Reading 

Davis, Paul R., Kari Dodson, Susan E. Bergh, and Andrew James Hamilton, dirs. In Dialogue: On the Chimú Prisoner Textile. The Menil Collection, 2021. 55:19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k703JmRoBzc 

Hamilton, Andrew James. “New Horizons in Andean Art History.” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 75/76 (2016): 42–101. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45283274  

Stanfield-Mazzi, Maya. “Weapons and Phantasms: The Painted Cloths of Chachapoyas and Peruvian Independence.” Age of Revolutions, January 10, 2022. https://ageofrevolutions.com/2022/01/10/weapons-and-phantasms-the-painted-cloths-of-chachapoyas-and-peruvian-independence/ 

Stanfield-Mazzi, Maya. Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820. University of Notre Dame Press, 2021. https://search.worldcat.org/title/1236266146