The Museum of Craft and Design presents RugLife, an original exhibition by 14 contemporary artists around the world who explore the medium of this functional-object-turned-artpiece. RugLife challenges our assumptions about everyday objects: functional objects are all created and designed by someone with some aesthetic in mind, and in that sense, each object has its own story to tell beyond its basic function.
Weaving Together Past and Present
The rug as an object of daily use throughout cultures and societies makes it a medium that is familiar and approachable by all. The range of voices in this exhibit transforms these objects into works of art addressing cultural issues such as religion, technology, social justice, housing and the environment. The artist Ai Weiwei included Tyger, 2022, a hand-knotted, hand-spun, hand-dyed natural Ghazni wool rug with an image of a tiger poised on its back, tightly locked into the square compositional frame. Specially commissioned for the Tomorrow’s Tigers project, the organization raises funds and awareness to conserve and increase wild tiger numbers. In Tibetan culture, the tiger personifies wisdom and strength and invokes fearlessness and fortitude. The spelling, Tyger, is a reference and tribute to William Blake’s famous poem from 1794, The Tyger.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
in the forests of the night:
what immortal hand or eye,
could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Cultural Identities
Black vernacular hair designs serve as inspiration for a number of works by artist Sonya Clark. Her unconventional take on the rug is titled Comb Carpet. The piece is made from hundreds of standard black plastic combs, teeth facing up. Loaded with layers of meaning about racial stereotypes, the artist as storyteller uses her power to reappropriate this cultural symbol, and hair as a literal carrier of DNA also speaks as a metaphorical connection to one’s roots.
Ali Cha’aban creates a profound statement on Arabic identity by covering every surface of a standard white plastic chair with carpet. The artist lives in Kuwait, and the inexpensive stackable Western-style Monobloc lawn chairs are often seen in Arabic communities, particularly in displaced populations. In an attempt to bring a sensibility of home to unhoused or refugee communities, Cha’aban reinserts the rug to dignify the design of displacement.
Cardboard Carpets by Wendy Plomp takes the portability and functionality of cardboard to create a rug transformed from an oft-discarded disposable substance. The interlocking panels of cardboard — with their functional tabs, flaps, and perforated fold markings — add to the unique shape and design of each carpet. “I noticed how people gave cardboard new functions — like to beg or sleep on, to draw on or use for hitch-hiking signs, even to break dance on, which gave me the idea to print the inside of a used box with a carpet pattern so that wherever you are, this carpet can be your temporary clean space, your home.”
Johanna Herr’s War Rug III (El Paso Shooting) is a deceptively playful, whimsical image in bright colors with floral patterns that are actually Walmart symbols. An assault rifle floats behind a turquoise outline of Texas. The entire composition is surrounded by a border of ammunition. The cartoonish colors and initially unserious appearance of the rug is a jarring reminder of the Texas Walmart shooting in 2019. On a day that should have been upbeat, families shopping for back-to-school supplies, an event transpired that ended up being the deadliest attack on Latinos in modern American history. As Herr reminds us, it is about “how (and whose) bodies become ‘ungrievable’ in dominant power structures.”
Telling the Story
The words “text” and “textile” share the same Latin root word — the verb texere, meaning to weave. Cultures are woven together in words that form sentences describing histories, and rugs weave these stories together via strands of wool or silk into designs. Rugs and carpets define the character of space, and in RugLife the medium connects our histories to the present moment. From the time when rugs were animal skins used to warm and adorn cave dwellings through the current day, the rug has the potential to be an expressive art form used to describe our collective human experience.
Sharon Anderson is an artist and writer in Southern California. She can be reached at mindtheimage.com
