Museo Textil de Oaxaca

The Museo Textil de Oaxaca occupies Casa Antelo at Avenida Hidalgo 917, about 250 m east of the Zócalo in the historic centre of Oaxaca City. It opened on 19 April 2008 and belongs to the Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú Oaxaca, the foundation behind several of the city's cultural spaces. Its purpose is to show, study and promote the textile traditions of Oaxaca, a state where weaving, embroidery and natural dyeing are still part of daily life in many Indigenous communities.

The building has a long history of its own. The land once belonged to the orchard of the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo Soriano, and between 1764 and 1771 Miguel de Bustamante built a single-storey adobe house on it. Ángel de Antelo y Bermúdez, a Spanish merchant who exported cochineal, the red dye that made colonial Oaxaca rich, later replaced it with the two-storey house that stands today. In the 19th century it served as the Hospital de Belén. Its interior was ruined by 2002, and the Harp Helú foundation bought and restored it in 2006. INAH lists it as a historic monument.

The museum's holdings come from nine donated private collections plus pieces bought for the museum, several thousand textiles from Oaxaca, the rest of Mexico and other countries. Rather than a fixed display, the rooms host changing exhibitions drawn from that stock and from living weavers. Highlights include a colonial huipil fragment woven with feathered thread, known by the Nahuatl name tlàmachtēntli, ceremonial sashes from several Indigenous communities and rebozos from Chilapa, Tenancingo and Santa María del Río. The museum also runs workshops on techniques such as embroidery, crochet and lace joining, hosts the TEXTIM meetings on Mesoamerican textiles, and has a library and a shop selling work by Oaxacan and Mexican artisans at fair, non-haggled prices.