Yarns cross cultures.

• Position: Yarn paintings of Huichol culture

When Robert Forman began making yarn paintings in 1969 as a high school student in New Jersey, he was only vaguely aware that there were people in Mexico working in a similar technique. One day Forman purchased a yarn painting at a Greenwich Village flea market. Looking at the work, he realized that his technique was not unique. The yarn painting he bought was by a Huichol Indian from the western Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico.

Huichol yarn paintings are extensions of traditional prayer objects. Their designs are derived from the animal and plant world, from objects and phenomena important to the daily and religious life of the Huichol people. Huichol yarn paintings have been called "permanent prayers."

In 1992 Forman received a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Fellowship enabling him to go to Mexico and meet the Huichol yarn painters. Carrying two small yarn paintings, slides of his work, and a Spanish-English dictionary, Forman searched out fellow artists. Known for their suspicion of outsiders, the Huichol seemed fascinated by the coincidence of the parallel development of yarn painting. "Suddenly I felt part of a group," says Forman, "as if I had been inexplicably linked to this living tradition without knowing it."

In Mexico City, Forman met the artist Refugio Gonzalez who handed him a board, glue, and a piece of yarn and asked him to demonstrate his technique. Forman glued the yarn in a circle and handed it back to Gonzalez who took a different color yarn and filled in the circle. Ita, Gonzalez's wife, then glued an eyebrow above the circle making it into an eye. Gonzalez sat down and showed Forman how he adheres yarn with wax, then moved over and let Forman work on his painting in progress.

After a few months of visiting a number of yarn painters, Forman was invited to live in the Huichol community of Santa Caterina, where he participated in the daily life of one family and was able to observe the rituals that serve as the basis for their art. Upon returning to New Jersey the same year, he began work on Nierica, a five-foot circular painting that captures his experience among the Huichol people. The central image of this painting is the sun surrounded by a Santa Caterina landscape with a border of Huichol people intertwined with images from their art. Nierica is a Huichol word derived from nieriya, meaning to see. The nierica symbolizes a visionary ability facilitated by a small round mirror, or formerly, by water.

Although Forman's...