Art: The Spider Women

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The Navajo blanket—mostly in the form of machine-made imitations—has long been a popular product for the tourist trade. Brightly colored, durable, it will serve to cover a grand piano or enliven a teen-ager's den. Only in recent years has it become apparent that the Navajos are a tribe of unusual vitality, and that the blankets they made during the 19th century express a remarkable artistic spirit.

To illustrate that spirit, Los Angeles Sculptor Anthony Berlant and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, curator of textiles and costumes at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, have brought together 81 strikingly beautiful Navajo blankets from public and private collections—including those of such artists as Jasper Johns, Georgia O'Keeffe and Frank Stella. This comprehensive exhibit of Navajo weaving has spent most of the summer in Los Angeles and will open later this month at the Brooklyn Museum, then moving on to Rice University, Kansas City and Hamburg, West Germany.

Magic. A nomadic tribe of warriors, the Navajos called themselves the Dineh ("People of the Earth"). In the middle of the 16th century, they migrated from what is now northwestern Canada to the American Southwest. There they first encountered horses and sheep—both brought to the New World by Spanish conquistadors. While the Navajo men hunted and raided, the women learned weaving from the tribe's more peaceful neighbors—and frequent victims—the Pueblos. At first they copied Pueblo styles, but they soon developed their own. As early as 1795, Governor Fernando Chacón observed that "they work their wool with more delicacy and taste than the Spaniards."

Weaving was partly a religious ritual, accompanied by solemn chants. "Spider Woman instructed the Navajo women how to weave on a loom that Spider Man told them how to make," according to a Navajo legend. "The crosspoles were made of sky and earth cords, the warp sticks of sun rays, the healds of crystal and lightning..."

At the birth of a baby girl, a Navajo woman was supposed to find a spider web and to rub it on the child's arm so that her fingers would never tire of weaving. When the girl grew of age, she began weaving between two upright trees, and she created her patterns without any kind of preliminary design. The magic tradition, according to Spider Man's message, "is yours to work with and to use following your own wishes."

To the Navajo, a blanket was a second skin. He wore it, slept under it and hung it across the door of his hogan, both as a defense against wind and rain and as an object of delight. Its geometric patterns, rarely repeated, expressed the individuality of the creator and also, according to how it was draped, that of the wearer. Cumulatively, in a strange way, the blankets tell a whole history of the tribe and of its conflicts with the white man.

The earliest blankets that survive date from the late 18th century, mostly coarsely woven fragments that are striped in the natural sheep's wool colors of brown and white. Some of these were found by anthropologists in Canon del Muerto ("Massacre Cave"), where a number of Navajo families were slaughtered by Spanish soldiers in 1805. The relics lay undisturbed for years because the Navajos feared spiritual contamination by the dead.