IMAGE DETAILS

Boucherouite or rag rug, Morocco, late 20th century. Kea Carpets and Kilims, Brooklyn

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17 June 2010

New Yorkers have a wealth of opportunities to look at one of the most recently discovered weaving traditions of North Africa during May by way of two exhibitions focusing on the Moroccan rag rugs: ‘Rags to Richesse: Rugs from Morocco’, 20 May-2 July at Cavin-Morris Gallery in co-operation with Gebhart Blazek in Vienna and ‘The Untrained Eye’ a collaboration between Kea Carpets and Kilims, Brooklyn and Alberto Levi Gallery, Milan from 22 May 2010 until the end of June.

These rugs, known as Boucherouite, were first featured in an article in HALI 162 written by Axel Steinmann and Blazek following a show at the latter’s Graz gallery, and represent the cultural reaction of weaving communities to changes in their economic and social circumstances. In the 1960s, Moroccan society witnessed a change form nomadic and semi-pastoral animal husbandry to settled farming and social migration which in turn lead to wool becoming rarer and more expensive; the weavers replaced its use in domestic weaving with re-cycled wool, cotton, synthetic fibres, Lurex, Nylon and plastic. By the 1990s, with the increasing urbanisation of the rural communities young weavers used these materials to make these truly expressive weavings in increasingly idiosyncratic and individual compositions. These rugs, examples of which are on view and for sale in both exhibitions, represent the emergence of a new tradition that while connected to older weaving typologies of Morocco are an unexpected pan-Moroccan artistic and cultural phenomenon worthy of the attention and collecting focus of the rug and wider art community.