Untangling_Threads__Women_Artisans_in_Moroccos_Rug_Weaving_Industry.html

Untangling Threads

women artisans in morocco’s rug weaving industry

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Untangling Threads

Brooklyn, NY

Email: akate@kantaracrafts.com

Website: www.untanglingthreads.kantaracrafts.com





Press Release:

Contact: Alia Kate                                                                                             May 18, 2011


While photographer Anna Beeke and curator Alia Kate began their artistic journey with the unprecedented and headline-grabbing Oberlin Women’s Rugby Calendar in 2006, this month they have reconvened in Oberlin for yet another creative endeavor on the eve of their five year college reunion. Opening on May 9th and running through May 30th at Oberlin College’s Mudd Library is Untangling Threads: Women Artisans in Morocco’s Rug Weaving Industry. This exhibit displays handwoven Moroccan rugs beside documentary photographs of the weavers and their families, thereby creating a link between the traditional textural and modern visual arts.

From rugby to rugs, Kate and Beeke have created a project that is a testimony of how rural Moroccan weavers live their lives, celebrate their Amazigh identity, and most importantly, how they sustain the pertinence of their ancient art in the face of a globalizing world. The legacy of these women’s art form is manifest in the woven carpets and the photographs reveal how this ancient craft permeates all aspects of Moroccan life.


Kate, named Cleveland Magazine’s Most Interesting Person in 2009 for her fair trade rug importing business, has been collecting woven works for the past five years in a supportive role of the women who labor throughout various regions of Morocco. Beeke joins as a documentarian whose eye integrates seamlessly from journalist to aesthete.


In the photographs you see confident Amazigh Moroccan women who defy the stereotypes painted by the Western media. In the rugs you discover the dexterity of the weavers’ fingers, the boundaries of their imagination, and the antiquity of their craft. With this Untangling Threads reveals the faces and the hands behind the handicraft of weaving in Morocco.


This is the fourth installment of the Untangling Threads exhibit, which has been shown in a host of different venues. Debuting in a New York gallery, it has since traveled to a New Jersey High School gallery and most recently appeared in the New York Festival of Ideas for the New City. Kate and Beeke are proud to bring the show back to their alma mater’s library and transport the viewer from Ohio to the rural world of Moroccan women where everything is connected to the rug weaving industry.