Cool Hunting c/o Quarterly Co: Shipment Five
Our latest shipment delivers a handmade Huichol disc celebrating the traditional Mexican art and craft
Our Quarterly Co subscribers know we love to work with artists and are very inspired by our travels. CHQ05, just hitting mailboxes, celebrates Huichol, a traditional Mexican art and craft using small colorful beads to decorate clothing, instruments, animal figures, skulls, and other items in traditional motifs including rain, butterflies, eagles, and the sun. The art is part mystical, part religious, very connected to the region’s natural surroundings and heavily inspired by the bright and intensely colorful hallucinations generated from the peyote cactus, leaving a lasting impression frequently used as design inspiration.
Huichol art may look simple, but it requires years of apprenticeship to master. Taking its name from the ethnic group that lives in the Nayar mountains in Mexico’s Nayarit, Durango, and Jalisco states, it represents an important part of the communities’ local economies.
Sending a dose of peyote with a do it yourself kit wasn’t an option, so we asked Enrique from the Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico City to help us create something equally impressive for our Quarterly Co subscribers. He introduced us to the Puwari collective, started by the accomplished Huichol artisan Basilia Muñoz de la Cruz, and we commissioned them to create these pieces. The Huichol collective’s 20 women artisans spent several weeks making these beaded wooden discs—each unique—which represent a slice of a local squash, subtly adorned with a small “CH.”
We welcome our subscribers to share their one-of-a-kind Huichol discs with us by using the #CHQ05 #Huichol and @quarterly hashtags. For those readers wanting to get in on the next shipment visit Quarterly Co to sign up. We can’t spill the beans on the upcoming things we have in the works, but you can see a few of our previous Quarterly shipments, like these custom travel candles from South Africa and Joshua Harker’s awesome 3-D printed skull.
