In the world of antique and vintage rugs, there are hundreds of absolutely incredible artists. These artists range from historical to contemporary.
Our Nazmiyal Antique Rugs artists blogs explore textile artists who work in rugs, as well as other historical and contemporary artists who work in a variety of mediums.
From fashion designers (think Karl Lagerfeld), to photographers (like Terry Richardson), to sculptors (Anthony Caro), to painters (like Picasso and Andy Warhol), to iconic, groundbreaking textile artists (like Marta Maas and Wassily Kandinsky), our aritsts blogs cover every artist you could hope to read about. The blogs even venture into examining newer, modern rug artists like Agne Kisonaite and Faig Ahmed.
If you’re a lover of art, textile or otherwise, you’ll love browsing through our archive of blogs about artists. Don’t forget to keep checking back, as we’re always writing something new!
Sheila Hicks is an American artist who has been active since the 1950s. She is well known for her colorful, creative textile weavings that often become 3d sculptural forms. She is known and has worked all over the world and her works are displayed in dozens of museums.
Faith Ringgold, a New York native, is an artist best known for her narrative quilts. Her experience in multiple different medias as well as her unique storytelling perspective make her work stand out from the crowd. A bold woman who doesn’t back down from what she believes in, she is also a well known activist for feminism and anti-racism.
Gunta Stölzl was an iconic textile artist whose works have changed the world. She was mostly active during the 1920s and 1930s, creating textiles with expertise learned at the Bauhaus. Later, she became a weaving master, teaching and passing along her skill and craft to other weavers.
The gorgeous and opulent tapestries known as the Beauvais tapestries were woven at the Beauvais manufactory in the 17th and 18th centuries. Often considered the second most important tapestry manufactory in France after the Gobelin manufactory, the Beauvais tapestries were made for nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie. Let’s take a closer look at the history and development of this iconic manufactory.
Rugs have been used throughout history and all over the world for religious contexts. In Belize, a truly stunning type of rug is a popular tradition and form of art used to celebrate Easter. These incredible creations can be found along roadways during Good Friday. The sawdust carpets are a perfect example of the creativity and beauty of rug making around the world.
It takes any textile weaver a very long time to create a beautiful carpet by hand. So can you imagine if after all that hard work, the piece was destroyed and all that remained of it were the pictures taken while it existed? To some, this may sound like a nightmare, but for artist Danielle van Ark, this is an essential aspect of her artwork. She creates unique sand carpets that are as beautiful as they are ephemeral.
When you look at a work of art by Antonio Santin, you may think at first that you are looking at an intricate hand-woven rug. However, Santin is not a rug-maker but a painter. For each of his oil paintings of rugs, he uses thousands of brushstrokes to accurately recreate every detail of the original’s fabric and patterns. It is not the detailed painting of the rugs themselves that make Santin’s paintings so arresting yet so unsettling, though. It is what appears to lie beneath.
The 16th and 17th centuries are called the “Golden Age of Carpet Weaving.” Estimations based on trade records, dowries, and estates suggest that 100s of thousands of carpets were produced and traded during that time. However, it is believed that only about 2-3,000 carpets and carpet fragments are still in existence today.
In the past, creating a carpet was a painstaking and exceedingly slow process. Some of the masterpieces that we have today took teams of weavers years to create. They have a quality that allows them to last for centuries if they are properly taken care of and preserved. Now, you can find thousands of mass-produced carpets at exceptionally cheap prices. However, something is missing. A hand-knotted rug was carefully crafted by the artisan. They poured their heart and soul into its creation. This is something that a machine made carpet can never reproduce, and the message that We Make Carpets wants to say to the world.