How My Scarves Ended Up in a Cathedral
It all started with a gift.
My mother-in-law gave a Mali scarf to her boss at the Museo Catedral in Santo Domingo. She loved it so much that she asked if we could make something custom for the museum.
That was the beginning of Woven Prayers (how I like to call it after the prayer I wrote in the borders).
They sent me photographs of objects from the collection, things on display inside the Cathedral, pieces that had been living inside those walls for centuries, and told me the whole story. My mother-in-law told me the story of La Virgen de la Altagracia, the patron of the Dominican Republic, and how she is said to have appeared under an orange tree. I knew immediately that the orange tree was going in the border. And as for the colors, I wanted to give her the Dominican flag. Red, blue, and white, holding everything together.
I made seven sketch proposals and they chose three.
One of my favorite decisions in the whole process was for the design of La Virgen. I didn't want to give her a typical crown. There was an object in the museum collection that looked like a crown, so I used that instead, and I love how that detail tied the story of La Virgen de la Altagracia with the Cathedral.
After the first scarf went out and people responded to it, they came back and asked me to paint two more proposals from the original seven — one centered on the Cathedral's mosaics, and one built around a drawing of the Holy Family I had made before. Three designs in total. All of them are still in the gift shop today.
I haven't been able to travel to see them in person. But Eduardo, my husband (whom I'm sure you've met either at the markets or through social media), went. He visited the Cathedral, and the museum, went into the gift shop, and sent me photos and videos. Looking at those images - my scarves hanging inside the oldest cathedral in the Americas felt like something I don't have the right word for yet.
I grew up Catholic and I still practice. Museums and places of worship are places where I feel something I can't explain, a kind of reverence that I carry into the studio with me whether I mean to or not. For my work to live inside a place like that it felt like a sign (call it superstitious, or maybe a little of that Latin American magic realism that lives within me). A confirmation that what I'm doing is real, that it has value, and that doing the thing that wakes up your soul is its own form of gratitude.
I keep making things because of moments like this one, and because, well, I just simply love making it.
The Woven Prayers collection lives exclusively inside the Cathedral gift shop in Santo Domingo. If you have an important event, or you are a museum, hotel, or cultural institution thinking about what it would look like to commission something made specifically for your place — I would love to start that conversation.
Every commission begins the same way: with research, with listening, and with the belief that the best object for a place is one that could only have come from there.
Write to us info@malicollection.com or DM @mali.collection. Wholesale and institutional inquiries welcome.
With warmth, Bárbara P.V.P 💖
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