The extremely fine stitching of this cloth’s embroidery, its complex patterns, and the irregular feature at one end—like a sketch done in thread—make it a masterpiece of central African textile art. Made for a woman of royal rank or high social status, it comes from the Mbeengi region of the northeast Kuba Kingdom. This textile’s all-embroidered ground and design layout, with a partitioning of the surface into multiple blocks of patterning, link it to the earlier artistic conventions of Kongo textile art, but its character remains distinctly Mbeengi.