HANOVER, NH.- The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College highlights selections from its collection of colorful and visually enticing blouses, or molas, made by the indigenous women of Kuna Yala, a narrow strip of land and islands along the Caribbean coast of Panama. On view now through December 7, 2008, in the first-floor galleries, Dressing Up Culture: Molas from Kuna Yala explores the textile art of mola making and its importance to the cultural survival of the Kuna women.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, mola making has become an important means of cultural expression among indigenous Kuna women. Executed on layered panels of cotton fabric, mola patterns yield an astounding array of traditional and contemporary themes via abstract, geometric, and figurative designs with diverse representations ranging from appropriations of pre-Hispanic symbolism to motifs derived from the natural world, Kuna legends and daily life, political posters and events, commercial labels and advertisements, books and magazines, mass media and popular culture, cartoons, and of course, the human imagination.

As a uniquely Kuna art form, molas have helped the indigenous peoples of Kuna Yala, particularly women, preserve their cultural and ethnic identity in the face of homogenizing Western forces. The wide diversity of the molas in the Hood’s collection reveals not only the imaginative breadth of this textile art but also the cultural resistance and strength of survival that characterizes Kuna culture. With its seemingly endless potential for artistic and cultural expression, the mola has indeed become an international symbol of Kuna woman’s identity and cultural survival.

The Hood Museum of Art’s holding of almost sixty molas was assembled primarily by two Dartmouth collectors. Russell A. Mittermeier, Class of 1971, purchased about twenty molas for the Dartmouth College Museum while he was in Panama in 1970, conducting research at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Center Baloa. Alice Cox (Mrs. Sidney Cox, Class of 1939hW) collected almost thirty molas while traveling to Panama to visit her daughter Barbara Vallarino (Mrs. Joaquin J. Vallarino Jr., Dartmouth Class of 1943W), who gave the collection to the Dartmouth College Museum in 1977.