American Visionary Art Museum display

Some war rugs (plus a recent salt bag from Herat) plus a couple of Navaho weavings with 9/11 references, at the opening last Friday night at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

Nancy Hatch Dupree: an interview

Listen with Philip Adams on the ABC’s Late Night Live

cold war art

I read somewhere that artists in The West were not producing images about war or the arms race. I thought “that can’t be right?”  Then I remembered this Sydney University Art Workshop poster, designed by Nigel Lendon and printed by Pam Debenham. Never been translated into a war rug!

goat’s hair selvedge theory

One of the folk tales which is told by dealers as a means to identify an “authentic” Baluch carpet – which since 1980 is a questionable concept anyway – is that a coarse goat’s hair selvedge is said to prevent scorpions from wandering onto a carpet. Well, maybe, but it also works for snakes! Here’s a photograph from a 1994 issue of Hali where herpetologist and Baluch authority Jerry Anderson proves his theory! But did anyone ask: what’s to stop them creeping and crawling on to the carpet from the fringe ends? I’m sure the dealer would have an answer… Read the whole Tom Cole interview on his site here…

HALI: We have heard that during the recent troubles the Baluch peoples in northern Afghanistan were either killed or driven out by the local population, who resented them. Who are they? JA: They are a mixture of Baluch and Arabs, and also Lokharis, who do not weave piled rugs but instead make those dark, dark kilims which often have tufts of wool inserted on the flatweave, and are woven in two pieces and joined in the centre. There are also Brahuis in that area who are called Baluch. There is a book written by a Russian that tells of the whole distribution of the Brahuis in Khorasan, Transcaspia, the Bukhara area and the Mazar-i-Sharif area. So many different peoples are called Baluch, or call themselves Baluch. In Farsi, the word means beggar. It also has the sense of nakedness, a person living in a tent and clothed in rags. Now the word -luch means a parasitic type of person. Ba means ‘from’ or ‘of’, so the name Baluch has bad connotations in Farsi… [The] Sistani tribal lifestyle was essentially intact until about 1980, nomads moving around in the same locales as they had for centuries. But then the Sarbandi and many other Sistanis were displaced during the Islamic Revolution.

war carpets as inspiration

See the blog of  the Chicago artist Barbara Koenen who re-makes war carpets in a surprising material…

Weavings of War – Fabrics of Memory: Ariel Zeitlin Cooke’s new online catalogue

See Ariel’s catalogue plus a walk-through of the exhibition now online.

Treasures from Afghanistan

See the notice on artdaily of the breathtaking exhibition of treasures in Washington.

Battleground

is the name of Max Allen’s exhibition in Toronto.

More coverage once we see it!

Prince Harry product placement

breaking news: now that Prince Harry has been outed as having been serving for the last ten weeks in Helmand province, we can reveal his interest in war carpets… Maybe he bought it on ebay? You too can have one just like it for $0.99. There are 21 listed as “hard to find…” Now wait for war carpets with Prince Harry as the subject… And from The Guardian (no pun intended), another view… you can read the text here – and does anyone see the irony in the fact that it’s a “defeat of the Soviets” motif in the war carpet Prince Harry has his foot on?

narcomansions in Kabul

 

I didn’t stop to enquire the rental of these three dimensional carpets…