In RugLife, a new exhibit at the Weisman Art Museum, rugs become the messengers of our stories. These familiar objects — walked on, spilled on, covered up with tables and furniture — become platforms for histories, conflicts and ideas that extend far beyond our homes.
From a distance, Sonya Clark’s “Comb Carpet” (2008), a celebration of Black barber shops and salons, looks like soft waves of billowing black cushions. Up close, the material is revealed to be thousands of plastic combs, sharp teeth angled upwards.
In Andrea Zittel‘s “Carpet Furniture: Drop Leaf Table” (1993), a flat rug juts upward at a 90-degree angle. Nevin Aladağ weaves a traditional Turkish rug to look like a basketball court for “Pattern Matching, Purple-Blue (2016).”
Curators Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox, a University of Minnesota alum, compiled the touring show for San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design, where it opened in 2023.
“The way we work is we see as much art as we possibly can,” Hoos Fox said. “When we see that there are constellations of concerns or ways of working, then we think, might this become an exhibition?”
Recently, the curators noticed artisans around the world focused on the age-old craft of rug-making, “exploring a whole range of issues that have to do with the kinds of conditions that surround all of us now,” Hoos Fox said, like climate change and political tensions.
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“We’re interested in how design reflects what’s going on in society,” Hoos Fox said.
“Tyger” (2022), by artist and Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, uses a Tibetan style to depict a tiger, belly side up. “He’s prone, he’s vulnerable,” Hoos Fox said. Ai created the piece as part of a World Wildlife Fund campaign to raise awareness and funds for tiger conservation. If it succeeds, Hoos Fox imagines Ai’s next rug might show the tiger on the offensive.
Ukrainian artist Oksana Levchenya’s “Pac-Man and Cossacks” (2022) fuses vintage gaming imagery with Eastern Slavic history, weaving Pac-Man alongside folkloric patterns of Cossack soldiers, connecting the ongoing war in Ukraine to centuries-long struggles for independence.
In “Grandpa’s Monobloc” (2023) by Lebanese-born artist Ali Cha’aban, a plastic lawn chair takes on a sense of ceremony, perfectly wrapped with a Persian rug. Cha’aban’s “I Fought the Internet and the Internet Won II (editions 2 & 3 of 3, 2019)” features a traditional carpet with a silkscreen superhero charging through it.
“He’s really interested in the kind of push-pull of being an Arab living in a Western culture, where the pull of the past and the force of the present are in constant friction,” Hoos Fox said.
Even without touching the rugs, the exhibition is a tactile experience. I longed for a physical connection with the woven surfaces — a reminder of the show’s preoccupation with comfort and its limits. The rugs draw you in, but their subject matter keeps you alert.
Some pieces subvert coziness to explore violence and control.
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In Johannah Herr’s “War Rug II (El Paso Shooting)” and “War Rug IV (Las Vegas Shooting)” (2020), vibrant, almost childlike colors create fanciful shapes depicting mass shootings in El Paso and Las Vegas. “All of these cheerful, lovely, fanciful shapes have very sober references,” Hoos Fox said.
Similarly, Noelle Mason’s “Ground Control (Mexicali/Calexico)” (2020) translates infrared heat imagery from U.S./Mexico border surveillance into tapestries. Its striking colors and aesthetic polish risk turning real human suffering into something beautiful, which I found unsettling.
By the end of “RugLife,” the art lingers in the imagination. The rugs offer comfort and invite touch, but they also provoke and challenge. Even the objects we think we know best can force us to reckon with histories of struggle and survival.
RugLife is on view through Dec. 28 at the Weisman Art Museum, 333 E River Road, Minneapolis. Admission is free and open to the public. More information here.
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