17 threads drape from two back panels made of wrapped horizontal cords and are painted with shifting greens to suggest a tilted square divided between the two panels. Even when installed against a wall, the threads shimmer and twist with the movement of the air. While at Cranbrook, Amaral often used brilliant colors and embraced an experimen- tal approach in terms of texture and material. She describes colors as resonating deep within her subconscious: “When I think about color, when I touch color, when I live color— the intimate exaltation of my being, my other self—I fly, I feel as another, there is always another being next to me.” 9 Although she applied these techniques to her upholstery and fashion designs, it wasn’t until a 1964 trip to visit her husband’s family in San Francisco that she was prompted to make individual tapestries. Amaral describes how “before going to San Francisco, I wove upholstery and drapery fabrics. Once there, artists persuaded me to try tapestries. First I created tight weaves, then experimented with a loose crisscross technique.” 10 One of the artists Amaral visited while in San Francisco was Lillian Elliott, a fiber artist and fellow alumna of Cranbrook Academy of Art. Elliott describes how, even with the success of the atelier, Amaral was cautious about beginning to do her own tapestries. Elliott explains, “I really encouraged her to begin doing tapestries and talked to her about how wonderful her color was, that I had great faith in her.” 11 Amaral’s first series of tapestries, Entrelazado (Interlaced) of the 1960s, features colors prominently in the designs and titles of the works, such as the vibrant turquoise grids in Entrelazado en blanco y turquesa (Interlaced in White and Turquoise) (1965, p. 41) or the complementary pairing of orange and green wool in Entrelazado en verde y naranja (Interlaced in Green and Orange) (1966, pp. 42–43) . Over the next decade in Bogotá, Amaral continued to experiment and to expand her studio practice. Her early woven tapestries introduced a split warp with separate vertical plain-weave bands that would become an essential element of her practice. Works such as Tejido doble en blanco, negro y gramote (Double Weave in White, Black, and Gramote) (1965, p. 40) have flat bands with a varied, gridded pattern in white, black, and muted brown. 12 Interspersed throughout the pattern are small sections without a weft, the horizontal lines of fiber. Instead, the warp is wrapped to create small barred openings in the tapestry. These wrapped threads became increasingly prominent in the composition of later works from the Entrelazado series. Wrapped cords in lilac, orange, red, and blue in Entrelazado en naranja y gris (Interlaced in Orange and Gray) (1969, p. 45) twist and wind their way throughout the woven structure. The flat woven bands and wrapped cords interlace, and, as it travels to the floor, the plaited structure releases at the bottom into a colorful fringe. Whereas these early tapestries feature wrapped cords that are interspersed throughout the composition, later works such as Adherencia (Adherence) (1973, p. 58) are made entirely of bundled, wrapped- warp threads that hang from a single point, calling to mind a tangled clump of vegetation. The 1960s, more broadly, was a critical decade in the history of fiber arts. Major exhi- bitions in both the United States and Europe featured textiles made by artists experimenting