Peter Koepke, a textile enthusiast and owner-director of the Design Library, a vintage textile resource in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., has been waiting decades for his latest acquisition — a collection of mid-20th-century Amazonian textiles from the jungles of Peru.
“I feel like I’ve come full circle with this,” he said.
Each piece in the collection — comprising a few hundred textiles and some pottery — features a series of linear designs based on constellations of the night sky.
“The Shipibo [an Amazonian tribe] believe these designs have healing properties,” Koepke said. “They’ve been using them for centuries. They believe the designs help to straighten out energy that is unbalanced. The patterns are quite orderly and elegant at the same time.”
All the pieces are hand-painted by women in the tribe and some pieces are overdyed with mahogany bark or embroidered.
When the original owner of the textiles — an anonymous collector who had a “huge appetite” for all kinds of tribal art, Koepke said — died 10 years ago, Koepke wrote a letter to the estate saying he wanted to be able to distribute the collection. He never heard back. But a couple of months ago, the estate contacted Koepke and he was invited to view the collection. He bought it directly from the estate.
“I was surprised to see how intact it was,” Koepke said of the collection, a huge score for a man who started traveling to the Amazon in 1971.
“It’s a true passion of mine, that area of South America,” he said. “There is an energy that exists there that is like no other place in the world.”
Koepke has been co-curator of a variety of exhibits on Amazonian art, including 1984’s “The Cosmos Encoiled: Indian Art of the Peruvian Amazon” at the Center for Inter-American Relations Society in New York. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan featured “Primitivism in 20th Century Art.” One of the show’s two catalogues showed a cubist painting by Picasso alongside an African mask that could have been the artist’s inspiration.
“I call the collection Tribal Esoteric,” Koepke said of his latest find, “and I think designers of all kinds are going to appreciate these fabrics.”