Kuba Shoowa Prestige Panel

A plain brown lattice, where nobody lost their nerve and nothing else happened.

This Shoowa prestige panel is Kuba, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central Africa, and dates to the 20th century. It is piled raffia. Kuba textiles were woven and embroidered to be worn, gifted and buried with the dead, long before collectors hung them on walls. Broad brown diamonds sit inside a cream lattice of wide bands, with no black at all. The pile of the brown areas looks plush and the scale is open and simple, with nothing else in the field. The panel is 17.5 inches wide by 22 long.

Proof that restraint can be a design choice.