As we enter the holiday season, this week's featured work of textile art is a reverse applique stitched cotton panel with a Nativity scene by an unknown artist from the Kuna People who live in the San Blas Archipelago off the northeastern coast of Panama. These embroidered pieces, intertwining brilliantly colored geometric patterns with imagery drawn from nature, native folklore, and Bible stories are known as molas--the Kuna word for “shirt” or “clothes”--since they are prominently displayed on the front and back of women's blouses. Anthropologists trace the origins of mola textile art back to the elaborate designs Kuna women once painted on their bodies. When Spanish colonizers and missionaries compelled them to wear clothes, they simply transposed these decorative motifs onto fabric. In this whimsical depiction of the Birth of Christ, one of four Nativity scenes in the Molas of the Kuna People gallery in the Schools of Sacred Art section, the expected ass has gone missing, while the ox keeps watch at the manger with a dove, a rooster, a lamb, and a cat! (John Kohan)