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Magic
Carpets
The Language of Carpets and the Magic Carpet Project: Springfield Museum (Nov. 5-Jan. 17) Wishes, hopes and dreams are woven into some carpets, and this is the source of their magic. It's what makes people fall in love with them. Not all carpets are magic, of course. Yet not one, but two kinds of magic carpets are on display at the Springfield Museum. The first is steeped in cultural tradition, and the other is new and cross-cultural. But both, according to exhibition curator and contributing artist Holly Piper and carpet aficionado and Istanbul merchant Ali Avci, tell stories and express basic human needs, which is what makes them special. Encounter in Istanbul The origins of the exhibition go back to a serendipitous encounter on an afternoon in July 2001 in Istanbul. Fulfilling a long-held dream, Piper had been visiting Turkey for a month. After visiting countless carpet shops, she had become obsessed with carpets, their colors, lines and motifs, which she drew for herself. That afternoon was the last on her trip. She wanted to take one last look at carpets but, weary of the tea rituals in merchant shops that had filled her days, she took a long walk instead. After a couple of hours, hungry and afraid of getting lost, she decided to turn back when she caught sight of colorful piles of naturally dyed wool drying on the sidewalk across the street. She hesitated, but curiosity got the better of her, and she walked over to take a look. Carpets hung over the sidewalk, between trees, against the wall. They seemed different from anything she had seen elsewhere. Particularly attractive was a small tapestry representing a person alone in a garden surrounded by birds and plants. It seemed to tell a personal tale rather than come from a production line. When Piper asked the attending vendor for its price, he looked surprised and unsettled, and abruptly went back inside the shop. Out came another man who, when she repeated her question, became agitated. He, too, ran back inside. A third man came out. He questioned her about her interest in the rug. "Are you a collector?" he asked. "Are you buying for a museum?"
"No, no." "This piece costs far more than that one," the merchant said, pointing to a much larger rug. "Come in and I will tell you about it." So they went inside and had tea. The merchant was Ali Avci, a man passionate about antique oriental rugs with a story. The piece Piper liked so much was tribal, and Avci told her stories about the people who had woven it — just what she had been thirsting to hear. They established an immediate connection. That very afternoon, he took her to rug shops where tourists didn't usually go, but where the rugs were ancient. He told her what to look at and what to look for. He also insisted on offering her as a gift the rug she had admired at his shop. "You have the soul for this piece," he said. This was the beginning of both a friendship and a partnership. Piper went back to Istanbul for the month of November, during which Avci educated her about carpets. "It was grueling but exhilarating," Piper recalls. "Ali notices things about rugs and their stories that no one else sees, and people in the trade really value his opinion." After 9/11, tourism was down, and some people in Turkey who depended on tourists went hungry. Avci arranged to ship about 90 "treasure rugs" for Piper to sell back home. He estimated that the sale of those rugs would feed about 300 families for a month. Piper wondered how she would ever manage to find homes for the rugs, but Ali had faith. "People will come," he assured her. And they did: The word spread about the rugs at Piper's barn without her ever advertising, and the pieces quickly found adoptive families. As soon as Piper received payment, taking no commission for herself, she sent the money to Turkey, where owners had trusted Avci's judgment enough to hand over their carpets without security. Since then, Piper has gone back to Turkey a few more times and there have been two more shipments. "Every time I go," Piper said, "it's like being taken into the culture in a deeper and different way." The Language of Carpets As Piper sees it, the entire adventure from meeting Avci to the current exhibition is about sharing and transmitting knowledge. "Ali's intent from the start was to teach and educate me," Piper explained. "There was an urgency on his part to give me that knowledge." Piper has found ways to further share what she has learned with people here, but it all starts with the carpets themselves, or rather with the individual who first conceives the design and embeds elements of her own life story — most weavers are women — in them. Obviously the story element does not apply to carpets commercially designed with recycled motifs and patterns but only to traditional tribal carpets that women wove for themselves and their families to serve as rugs, prayer rugs, tables, covers, screens and wall hangings. "Not one is the same," Avci said, "and the first copy is a treasure and collectible. The woman will draw her surroundings, something that she sees every day. She will add her wishes and hopes, not directly, but they will influence the drawing. "If a woman is weaving a rug for herself, she'll add something of herself to it even, if she's copying the design from another carpet," Avci said. "In this sense, the carpet is only partially a copy and has value, though not as much as the original carpet." On the other hand, when it comes to commercial carpets, "The weaver repeats exactly what's in front of her," Avci said. "There is no soul in such carpets." The quality Avci loves in some carpets is their power to convey meaning and carry messages about human life. Those messages are most often communicated through a vocabulary of symbols and abstract patterns. Depicted objects are highly stylized, and so are animals and people, which only appear where Islamic rule against representation of beings is less strictly followed. Whatever is expressed — the grief of losing a child or the joy of birth — is no less vivid for the weaver for being couched in abstract symbols than for the letter-writer who uses the alphabet. For the weaver, working her emotions into the weave of the carpet can be as therapeutic as for a painter working on canvas or a poet weaving words together. It expresses her artistic skills –— her sense of color, design and the weaving prowess.
The weaver's personal statement also speaks for her culture, because she embeds symbols about her community's religious beliefs, practical concerns, social aspirations and other art forms, such as architecture. Motifs, patterns, designs and weaving techniques point to specific regions, tribes and villages. Thus an ancient carpet can be dated. As traditional lifestyles are disrupted — either gradually by encroaching Western ways or brutally by war — the carpet remains a vibrant link to the past. Born of the need to communicate, rather than merely decorate, the motif vocabulary is rich and complex. Motifs may refer to the social status of the weaver, her relationship with her husband, her feelings, or to basic needs such as running water. Fertility motifs abound (wheat, pomegranate, grapes) and so do those related to protection (eyes, scorpions, stylized triangular amulets worn to ward off the evil eye, trees of life). A tribal carpet is also likely to include family and clan signs. As Piper points out, "From long ago until now people have been weaving their hopes and dreams into the rugs, and those haven't changed much because they're about basic human needs. They're about family, happiness, health, protection. That's what links it all." Prayer rugs figure the arched mihrab design, or prayer niche, which is pointed toward Mecca while praying. The crescent, a Mohammedan symbol, signifies faith.
Carpets, Carpets on the Walls Piper's goal in curating the exhibition was to "show a sampling of carpets with various motifs for people to look at and understand that there is a story." She chose some carpets for their artistry, others for their uniqueness. Most are old pieces made with hand-spun, naturally-dyed wool. All were once part of people's lives. Kilims are flat-weave or pileless rugs. (Kilim also refers to the foundation of hand-knotted rugs, which consists of transverse threads — the weft — interwoven with longitudinal threads — the warp. In kilims, only the weft is visible.) Created for the needs of the weavers and their families, kilims have survived as a genuine folk art and have become prized items in recent years. The show provides lovely examples from Anatolia, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, several of them prayer rugs, 50 to 120 years old. Other examples of flat-weaves include an 80-year-old Quashgai moj, a vanishing type of rug that involves a twill weave technique, and a brightly-colored Tulu from the Konya region in Turkey, an early kind of weaving in which the goat-hair pile is left long, resembling the long hair of the region's goats. Among hand-knotted carpets are several beautiful and unusual 90- to 130-year-old Shirvans presenting a great variety of symbols, motifs and designs. Shirvan rugs are very finely woven, with particularly small knots. To create the pattern of a hand-knotted rug, weavers tie dyed pieces of yarn to the rug's foundation. There are two kinds of knots: the asymmetrical, single Persian knot and the symmetrical, double Turkish knot. Most Oriental rugs use the more durable Turkish knot. Two charming, playful 80-year-old Kirgiz Felts display the "hands on hip" motif (a stylized female figure with her hands on her hips, inherited from ancient matriarchal beliefs in the mother goddess). The smaller piece was made with leftovers from the larger one. Felt is wool bound together by wetting it and forcing the fibers to shrink and adhere to one another as they dry. It preceded spinning and weaving and was an integral part of nomadic life. Warm and waterproof, it was used to cover people, animals, floors and yurts. It was also decorative. The only recently created work in the show are three pieces from Afghanistan. One, a prayer rug, reproduces a traditional Balouch design with geometric symbols and symmetrical patterns. In sharp contrast, the other two express the contemporary life experience of the weavers and show how individual artistic expression renews itself in response to cultural upheavals. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, some weavers no longer used abstract geometric symbols but resorted to representational means to narrate their stories. These "war rugs" depict tanks, helicopters, guns and soldiers. Afghan weavers thus evolved for themselves a contemporary rug art form of their own, as opposed to weaving Western contemporary designs for Western customers, which is becoming common throughout the carpet-making world. The exhibition also includes various samples of Kirgiz and Uzbek nomadic textiles. These include several kinds of camel decorations created by young girls in preparation for their weddings; tent bands; a saddle blanket; a knife case; a sufrah (a rug placed on the floor and used as a table for serving food); a wonderful 100-year-old yurt door with a holy spider motif. Also, bags of all kinds that include saddle bags, spoon bags and felt arrow bags. Traditional garments include a Turkoman camel-hair coat, probably a wedding garment, with colorful triangular protective amulets sewn on. Piper framed a variety of Uzbek Textile Samplers, all 60 to 100 years old. Spinning, weaving and natural dyeing supplies such as flowers, roots, bark and leaves are gathered in a glass case. Other samples include prayer beads and nazerluk beads for protection against the evil eye. Also on show are pieces Piper said she created "in a spirit of meditation, as a way of processing what I was learning." Among them is a wall installation of Prayer Flags cut out from her grandmother's old flour sacks, dyed with Turkish tea, hand-printed with gold text Piper also painted magnified fragments of antique prayer rugs and included within the layers of paint written prayers and wishes for the world.
Magic Carpets: A Bridge Between East and West The second half of the exhibition concerns the Magic Carpet Project, for which sharing experience and knowledge is also key. "I wanted to share some of what I'd learned with kids," Piper explained. She was working with Marcola children in a K-5 after-school program, and shortly after her second trip to Turkey decided to "do a little magic carpet thing" with them. She filled a little trailer room with rugs — her shipment had just arrived — and the room glowed with colors. The children came in and sat on some of the rugs. Piper explained how for centuries people had woven their stories into rugs using meaningful symbols, colors and designs. She told them the stories behind individual rugs, and how those rugs were used. She'd feared the children might be bored, but they plied her with questions. "They were so eager to learn about these other cultures," Piper said. Afterwards, she asked the children to create their own carpet designs on paper, to share through colorful designs their dreams and wishes for themselves, their families and their world. They placed their hopes in the center and surrounded them with a border to keep them in. Sometimes they added fringes to the sides. "It turned out so sweet," Piper said, "that I thought their designs should be woven to be shared with the world."
She called Avci in Istanbul to ask if it could happen. "Of course," he answered. Piper conceived the idea of a traveling exhibition that would include carpets designed by children from every state. She brought the workshop not only to nearby Junction City but also to Virginia, to an inner city school in Washington, D.C., to Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Mexico. Everywhere the response was overwhelming. "The story is what gets them," Piper said of the children. "They're interested in spite of themselves. They connect. Then they get involved and end up doing something that they feel good about." Out of about 200 designs created by children, Piper took 20 to Avci in Turkey. He translated the stories and wishes involved with each for the village weavers, and the weavers responded with extraordinary warmth and enthusiasm. They loved the idea of weaving the dreams of American children. "When a child designs a magic carpet," Avci pointed out, "his wishes are sometimes similar to those of the families of weavers in Turkey." So far, 12 magic carpets have been woven, involving almost as many weavers. Piper and Avci paid for these carpets. The other designs are waiting additional funding. "But I wanted to get it started, so it acquired its own momentum," Piper said. The first two magic carpets were hand-knotted. I Wish for a World to Dream on, designed by Madeline Thomas (Marcola), is an especially wonderful piece. The other 10 are small, delightful kilims. All are displayed next to the children's original drawings. They wish for good luck, happiness, believing in yourself, peace, following one's dream, protection, spring, new beginnings and "wackiness." They are whimsical, touching, funny and generous.
Avci's Dream "My dream," Avci said, "is to buy a Turkish black tent — a nomadic tent — and bring it to the U.S. Instead of showing the rugs in a museum, we would create a traveling cultural exhibit by setting up the tent in various cities and using it to show the carpets in their cultural context." This traveling exhibit would include traditional Oriental rugs as well as carpets from the Magic Carpet Project.
A Note on the Venue The Springfield Museum is a great venue and community resource, and it would take little to further enhance its gallery. Movable partitions could provide extra wall-space as needed, and more stands, especially higher ones that don't require people to bend over, would be useful. The current exhibition would certainly have benefitted. I also found the lighting spots erratic. Notwithstanding, credit is owed to director Kathy Jensen, to volunteer Nancy Karp who helped with installation, to Ram Meier who created a lovely poster banner for the exhibition, and to other museum volunteers so generous with their time and support. Such an exhibition proves the museum worthy of as much community support as it can muster — worthy of wishes and dreams. For further viewing of high quality, rare antique rugs and textiles, you may contact Piper at magiccarpetproject@yahoo.com
Bringing Vision Holly Piper noticed that many people in Avci's native Adiyaman region (formerly known as "Blind Adiyaman") had sight problems but could not afford glasses. Even in Istanbul, a magnifying glass she'd brought was treated like a treasure. After she mentioned this to a friend at Rainbow Optics, that friend talked to the manager, Sheila Abbott. Rainbow Optics donated 50 pairs of reading glasses, which Piper brought to Adiyaman. After word got out, a crowd of people came to Avci every night to find a fitting pair among the glasses filling a basket. The few left over were given to the local hospital.
Did You Know? Rug weaving can be traced back to the Neolithic age (7000 B.C.). The first examples consisting of warp and weft were flat-weave rugs resembling kilims. The oldest surviving hand-knotted carpet is the Pazyryk carpet. Protected by permafrost and discovered by Soviet archaeologists in 1949 in a royal burial mound in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, it dates back to the fifth century B.C. Its Turkish knot is still in use today. It was intended as a horse-saddle cover. The borders feature rows of elk and horsemen. Its high density (more than 200 knots per square inch) and the complex, delicate design suggest it was already part of a long tradition. Turkish rugs probably became known in Western Europe after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the fourth crusade. They figure frequently in Western paintings between the 14th and 17th centuries. Geometrically patterned rugs became known as Holbein carpets, after the German painter. Skilled weavers (usually women) can tie 20 knots in a minute, but the density of knots is such that it may take several months of continuous work to complete a rug. Unlike most objects, rugs acquire value as they are used and acquire patina. Today, 95 percent of rugs are made with machine-spun wool and synthetic dyes. Unlike the early aniline synthetic dyes, contemporary chrome dyes are of excellent quality. Nonetheless, a carpet made of handspun wool and natural dyes is more valuable. The colors obtained with natural dyes are highly saturated yet soft. In the early 20th century, synthetic dyes became the norm, and the recipes for natural dyes were lost. Dr. Harald Böhmer, a chemist and father of the natural-dye revival in the 1980s, rediscovered them through chemical analysis of older carpets and taught Turkish weavers how to once again produce and use natural dyes.
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