2025 Exhibits
Textile Treasures from Guatemala
Through July of 2025
Mariposa Museum has opened our winter exhibit, “Textile Treasures from Guatemala,” at 26 Main Street in Peterborough, NH.
The exhibit draws principally from a collection of huipiles, the stunning embroidered blouses woven by Mayan women in the highlands of Guatemala. A Peace Corps Volunteer collected these during her years in Guatemala and gave them to Mariposa when she moved west fifteen years ago. The huipiles are woven in narrow strips on backstrap looms and then pieced together, with magnificent embroidery, a great variety of vegetal (and now synthetic) dyes, and occasional use of the ikat tie-dying technique.
We have drawn from Mariposa’s extensive collection of textiles from around the world to show other uses of ikat from countries in Southeast and Central Asia; floral embroidery traditions from Europe in contrast to those from Guatemala; and children’s clothing from the Hmong and India as well as from the Mayan peoples.
