Many of the visitors coming to the Springfield Museums have a hat on their minds. After all, there’s a famous hat-wearing cat at the Dr. Seuss Museum. This winter they discovered a new hat in town in The Body Adorned: Artistry and Legacy of the Ancient Americas, at another of the Springfield Museums, The D’Amour Museum of Fine Art—and came away with a hat they could wear themselves.
From December 4, 2021 through February 27, 2022, The Body Adorned has explored treasures the ancient peoples of Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, and Mexico created to wear—as well as the influence that their metalwork, textile, and ceramic traditions have had on generations of artists up until today.
Among the treasures featured in The Body Adorned is a fine example of a four-sided Wari hat, circa 900 AD, made up of four rectangular sides, each depicting a composite bird-camelid figure. The Wari hat was so precious to the Wari, who dominated the south-central highlands and the west coastal regions of Peru from 500–1000 AD, that it often was given a place of prominence in the owner’s grave.
Wilcox Design developed the exhibition’s companion brochure specifically to interactively engage with the visitors of the Museum.
The brochure’s jacket cover can be removed and folded into a Wari hat. The jacket displays all four sides of the Wari hat on exhibition, with a perforation scored along the outline of the hat’s crown. Once torn along the scoring, the crown can be assembled using 3 adjustable tabs.
Here is the full brochure with the front and back flaps, before and after removing the perforated top portion.
The bilingual brochure is printed in English and Spanish. We alternate languages for the exhibition title when it appears on the cover—it is in English on the cover of the jacket, and in Spanish on the cover of the brochure.
To learn more: The Body Adorned: Artistry and Legacy of the Ancient Americas
Top photo: Maggie North, Curator of Art, Springfield Museums in the Wari hat. Photo care of the Springfield Museums, Springfield, MA