Squishing bugs, bacteria, and berries to create vibrant natural dyes, Gaby Cordon ’26 wove together her love of historical textile arts with her Guatemalan identity for her studio art honors thesis.
Cordon, who researched 20th-century fashion and architecture in high school at the New York Fashion Institute of Technology. “I was interested in fashion since I was really little,” Cordon said in an interview with the Record. “I took sewing classes, then drew a whole collection and made one of the pieces.”
She pivoted from this early interest in fashion when she came to the College, and was set on a career in architecture.
After a year of diving into architectural modeling and history classes, Cordon spent the summer following her first year at the College in Copenhagen, Denmark, where she studied the basics of architecture. While abroad, she came to realize that the history of art in general piqued her interest more than the actual process of designing buildings. “I like the way that art manipulates the way people like to move and act,” she said. “I think I realized that my favorite part is how art is connected to the body.”
As much as she enjoyed her classes in Copenhagen, Cordon felt that her studies were missing something. “[They were] missing that sazon, missing some spice,” she said. “I couldn’t put my finger on it.”
After reaching out to alums for advice, Cordon realized that, for her, a truly fulfilling artistic practice would have to connect back to her community. “I was untethered,” she said. “I was missing the roots of why this pertains to me and what’s at stake.”
Wanting to return to the familiarity of textiles, Cordon took Associate Professor of Art Pallavi Sen’s studio art class “QUILTY!” in her junior fall. There, she spent over 500 hours creating her first, completely hand-sewn, 100-by-90-inch quilt made from secondhand fabrics and natural dyes she made herself in the dye lab in Spencer Art Studio. “There are these bugs and bacteria that grow on plants that can be used to produce dyes,” she said. “It was just a very meditative practice.”
Inspired by the class, Cordon decided to focus her honors senior thesis on the history of indigenous Guatemalan weaving and quilting practices, connecting her passion for textile art and her Guatemalan ethnicity. Spending her senior Winter Study in Guatemala, she decided to hone in on answering one question: How do textiles hold memory?
Cordon traveled around various artistic hubs in Guatemala, from exploring the country’s largest textile market to taking classes on Western Guatemalan indigenous natural dyeing techniques. Throughout her trip, she brought her mother’s film camera from the 90s, snapping and developing photos herself to find artistic inspiration in the vivid colors of the indigenous patterns she saw. “The trip was amazing because [I got] to go to all these studios learning how to create natural dye [and] do the backstrap weave [in Western Guatemala],” she said. “And then the second half I was able to spend time with my grandparents [in Eastern Guatemala].”
While researching Guatemala, Cordon found a gap in the scholarship discussing indigenous weaving practices. Extensive literature has traced the traditions of indigenous textile patterns in Western Guatemala, specifically focusing on the Spanish influence in the dye-making technologies. However, Cordon found that art historical scholarship glosses over how the more prominent Spanish presence in the Eastern region — where her family originates — has influenced traditional weaving.
“There will be two sentences in textbooks [discussing Eastern Guatemala], saying they produce tobacco and just had a plantation,” Cordon said. “To be there and to find out that there have been these weavers that have been doing this Hispanic style of deshilado — or ‘getting rid of threads’ — since the Spanish conquered Guatemala, was fascinating.”
Cordon wanted to create an art piece that addressed her central question of memory in fabric, while also connecting her findings to her familial background. Over the course of the spring term, Cordon physically stitched together the photos he took during her trip, using fabric dyed with Mayan techniques. The photo weave represents a web of memory, tracing her experience with her heritage. “[My thesis] was a broader comparison between Western and Eastern Guatemala,” Cordon said. “But then the photos that I’m using deal more with this theme of memory.”
During the process of recreating the indigenous dyes she learned to make in Guatemala, Cordon appreciated the fact that the materials she sourced were native to New York rather than to Guatemala. “I’m a New Yorker first and foremost,” she said. “It’s not like I’m indigenous, and it’s not like my mom or my dad or my grandmother knows how to weave. The dyes I made were the Gringa version of [the dyes I made in Guatemala] … and I love it that way. I can’t get away from my identity.”
