NEW YORK, NY.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a special exhibition focusing on the Andean tunic, beginning March 8. Featuring some 30 tunics drawn from the Museum’s collection with loans from The Textile Museum, Washington, D.C., The Cleveland Museum of Art, and two private collections, The Andean Tunic, 400 BCE – 1800 CE, will examine the form of the tunic, essentially a type of shirt, which had an important cultural place in Andean South America for centuries. Textiles, a much developed art form there in ancient times, were themselves valued as wealth, and tunics were among the most treasured of them. The ancient peoples of northwestern South America are renowned today for their great abilities as weavers, dyers, and designers of textiles. The primacy of cloth was established with the beginnings of civilization in the region that is now Peru, when manipulating fibers into functional, and decorated, fabric