Rugs have an ancient history. From a living room to a shrine, from animal pelts to finely woven rugs destined for a monarch’s court, their significance changes according to their cultural context. ‘RugLife’, showing at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco until 20 April, is an exhibition that explores rugs as a medium to draw the viewer towards uncomfortable social issues.
For ‘RugLife’ curators Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox, it all started on seeing Nicholas Galanin’s White Noise, American Prayer Rug at the Whitney Biennial in 2019. ‘And then it was on our minds,’ says Duggan. ‘We started noticing there were a number of artists utilising the rug to convey certain social themes. Then, over the next few years, we started keeping a running list until we felt there was enough there to make a show.’
The fourteen international artists represented use rugs as a starting point to explore both personal and political themes. ‘We wanted to represent both known and emerging artists, as we think it benefits both sides equally to have their work shown together,’ explains Duggan.
Several artists draw on traditional rug designs and manipulate them in subtle, subversive ways. ‘Tyger’ by Ai Weiwei takes the ancient Tibetan tiger rug tradition and literally turns it on its head. The tiger would usually be found belly-down in pelt form, or fearsome and magnificent in the 19th-century woven version. Ai Weiwei’s beast is depicted with his stomach upwards in a vulnerable pose, as a reference to the plight of this endangered species. Its square format points to the William Blake poem of 1794, ‘The Tyger’ (‘What immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?’).
Similarly, an attractive surface belies a powerful message in Johannah Herr’s War Rug III (El Paso Shooting). Its electric colours conflict jarringly with the dark subject matter: the deadly shooting at a Texas Walmart in 2019. The rug is a nod to the Afghan war rug tradition (beginning in the 1970s) in which ancient weaving techniques are mixed with modern symbols of war such as the AK-47 assault rifle. In Herr’s version, the gun is placed against a background of a turquoise map of Texas, Walmart logos and noise-cancelling headphones as worn by the gunman.
Also disturbing, Noelle Mason’s handwoven rug Ground Control, is more than a richly textured landscape of red and blue rectangles interrupted by meandering lines: the red rectangles represent migrants at the Mexico/ USA border, as reproduced from a satellite image. Human lives and destinies are reduced to colourful shapes.
In a site-specific piece, Liselot Cobelens uses her hand-tufted Dryland rug to map a California landscape impacted by drought. Using data provided by climate scientists, Cobelens translates waterways into loop-pile tufting, and grassy areas into cut-pile tufting. Some portions are burned to indicate wildfire damage, others razed with sheep shears to indicate animal loss.
Many artists chose unconventional materials for their ‘rugs’: Wendy Plomp’s Cardboard Carpets have traditional prayer rug designs printed on cardboard boxes. Plomp observed how the unhoused give cardboard new functions, ‘to beg or sleep on, to draw on or use for hitchhiking signs, even to breakdance on’. In Comb Carpet, Sonya Clark reappropriated the plastic comb to create a woven artwork that confronts racial stereotypes, while also celebrating the rich legacy of African American hair weaving. Also highly conceptual, Azra Akšamija’s Palimpsest of ’89 is not a tangible object, but rather an animated digital installation in which traditional rug symbols and patterns are added or erased as a reference to the revisionist history of Akšamija’s native Yugoslavia.
For many of us, a rug is a symbol of home. For Lebanese artists Ali Cha’aban and Stéphanie Saadé, the rug represents something more complex: the conflicted emotions of moving to a new culture, and assimilation. In Cha’aban’s ‘My Imagination is no Longer Enough to Complete my Journey’, he takes two Persian carpets and silk screens Superman over them, wrestling with the traditional pattern as a representation of the artist’s inner turmoil, with neither element winning the battle for our attention. According to Cha’aban, the rugs are ‘about indulging in other traditions without letting go of your own culture’. Saadé’s Stage of Life is a rug from her family home in Lebanon that she has cut into strips for her new apartment in Paris. The gaps between the strips tell a story of nostalgia and longing, turning associations with stability and inheritance into something more fragile.
It makes sense to use rugs to tell deeper stories. The concept of weaving is poetic, a binding together of elements to create a visual narrative. As a delineator of space—when, as Duggan and Fox write, ‘space and politics are frequently interwoven’—the rug is the perfect medium for artists to explore the complex issues of our time. The exhibition will migrate to Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro in Summer 2025, Weisman Art Museum University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in Autumn 2025 and Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York in Spring 2026.
