Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Luxury Cloth: Cushion Cover
Not on view
Across the Kongo region and along the Loango coast, textiles had utilitarian, economic, and social uses as well as profound cosmological significance as part of a living universe in the continuous process of being created. Raffia fabrics were associated with times of transition and reproduction and used in rituals of birth, initiation, marriage, and burial: the newborn was laid on cloth; young people wore cloth skirts at initiation; a suitor carried gifts of palm wine and cloth to his future mother-in-law; families wrapped their deceased in the best cloth they could afford to prepare them for passage to the world of the ancestors; cloth was used to pay legal fees; and cloth changed hands when chiefs and rulers were installed or concluded alliances.
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