A tote bag featuring an image of our textile collaboration with Venancio Aragon that hangs in the Picayune tasting room and is used on our The Origin Chardonnay. 

The design of this textile is based on pictographs located in Mesa Verde National Park at a cliff dwelling known as Step House created by the Ancestral Pueblo culture. Crosses on Navajo weavings are usually referred to as Spider Woman's Crosses. The color scheme is based on the artist's expanded rainbow aesthetic that features over 250 colors of yarn dyed with both natural and synthetic compounds. The natural dyes include cochineal, indigo, onion skins, turmeric, madder root, Najavo tea, wild carrots, sage, rabbit brush and others

Words from Venancio:

"I weave on an upright tension loom, a technology of Indigenous origin. I view my loom as a powerful connection to culture, identity, and history. The survival and continuation of cultural art forms lies in the hands of those who remember and carry forward the teachings of our ancestors. My quest to learn and preserve my peoples' textile traditions have led to an ongoing journey of piecing together fragments of memory, oral histories, and archaeological material into my work. 

My textiles draw on ancient techniques once developed for utilitarian needs and purposes. Today many of my ancestral weaving techniques are in danger of being forgotten. I fuse bold geometric designs with a polychromatic saturation of colors to reflect my individual and technical freedom of expression. I view my tapestries as a living record of the cultural survival of my people and as a testament to the current vitality of my heritage. Each tapestry I create is unique not only to me but to the genre of Navajo textiles my work is descended from."