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Woven Histories

NO. B239

Lynne Cooke (ed.)

$65

Available: Shipping As Soon As Tomorrow

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Richly illustrated volume exploring the inseparable histories of modernist abstraction and twentieth-century textiles. Published on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Lynne Cooke, Woven Histories offers a fresh and authoritative look at textiles—particularly weaving—as a major force in the evolution of abstraction. This richly illustrated volume features more than fifty creators whose work crosses divisions and hierarchies formerly segregating the fine arts from the applied arts and handicrafts. Woven Histories begins in the early twentieth century, rooting the abstract art of Sophie Taeuber-Arp in the applied arts and handicrafts, then features the interdisciplinary practices of Anni Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, and others who sought to effect social change through fabrics for furnishings and apparel. Over the century, the intersection of textiles and abstraction engaged artists from Ed Rossbach, Kay Sekimachi, Ruth Asawa, Lenore Tawney, and Sheila Hicks to Rosemarie Trockel, Ellen Lesperance, Jeffrey Gibson, Igshaan Adams, and Liz Collins, whose textile-based works continue to shape this discourse. Including essays by distinguished art historians as well as reflections from contemporary artists, this ambitious project traces the intertwined histories of textiles and abstraction as vehicles through which artists probe urgent issues of our time.

"For years, R&K has been a favorite source for Kemble Interiors when we need antique, vintage, and custom designed rugs. Their inventory is deep and well displayed online and working in person is always such a pleasure too!"

— Celerie Kemble, Kemble Interiors

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Specifications:

Measurements: 0'9" x 0'11" ( 0.24 m x 0.28 m )
Categories: Textile, Volumes
Classification: Modernist (20th Century), Tapestry & Textile
SKU: B239

From The Journal

Stories from the Volumes Collection

Essays, artist dialogues, and provenance notes drawn from Rug & Kilim’s editorial desk.

June 23, 2026

Rug & Kilim’s Tapestry Artists’ Series: In Dialogue with Joanne Soroka

There are artists who weave cloth and the ones who weave ideas. And then there are artists; rare, serious, working at a register that most practitioners of any medium never reach, who weave lives. Not their own lives, though those are present too, but the lives of people who left no other record: emigrants who crossed oceans under duress, ancestors who worked rivers in foreign countries, families scattered across continents by persecution and necessity and the simple human desire for somewhere better than where they were. Joanne Soroka weaves these lives. She gives them, as she has said herself, the meaning that history denied them. The loom, in her hands then, is an act of remembrance, slow, physical, irreversible, and as close to justice as textile art has ever come.

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June 10, 2026

Rug & Kilim’s Tapestry Artists’ Series: In Dialogue with Jeni Ross

There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has stood inside a Jeni Ross installation, when the room stops being a room. Not because the work overwhelms the space in the manner of spectacle not because it shouts, but because it restructures. A Ross textile does not hang on a wall so much as claim it, establishing a gravitational field of color and material density that reorganizes everything around it with the quiet authority of a load-bearing element. You do not look at a Jeni Ross. You adjust to it. You find your position in relation to it. The room, in the most literal architectural sense, has acquired a new wall.

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June 8, 2026

Rug & Kilim’s Tapestry Artists’ Series: In Dialogue with Elizabeth Chester

There is a particular kind of looking that a great tapestry demands, slower than painting, more physical than sculpture, closer to reading than to seeing. The eye must travel. It must follow the thread, understand the structure, and then, having understood it, surrender to the illusion that the structure has been designed to create. The greatest European tapestries have always operated this way: technically transparent to the scholar and visually overwhelming to everyone else simultaneously. It is the most demanding of the textile arts, and the one that rewards sustained attention most completely.

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June 1, 2026

The Layered Home: 5 Ways to Rethink Floor Rugs and Wall Tapestries

The real spatial dimension does not get painted, it gets woven. Begin with hanging a piece such as Signed Vintage Lia Cook Tapestry slightly off-center on one of your main walls. Its intricate Jacquard weave and the friction created between its rayon and linen fibers will require a lot of breathing room, immediately establishing a gravitational pull of the whole room. But to balance this vertical tension, the ground beneath your feet needs to become much more rigorous. With the use of a rigorously beaten warp-faced plane such as cotton Indian Dhurrie or Antique Swedish Röllakan's interlocking tapestry weave, you create a flat but structurally resistant base. A ground made from a rigidly woven material needs to be challenged. The last textural transition will come from placing a Vintage Frazada Kilim with heavy weft interlace across your warp-faced plane. The act of overlapping your heavy weft on a rigorously

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May 19, 2026

What William Morris, Paul Poiret, and the Bauhaus Each Understood About the Rug and What French Art Deco Proved

In the winter of 1883, William Morris stood before a room full of wool merchants, manufacturers, and assorted Victorian worthies in a lecture hall in Birmingham and said something that no one in that room was prepared to hear. The decorative arts, he told them, were not decorative at all. They were the most serious form of human making and their degradation under industrial production was not an aesthetic problem but a civilizational one. He had brought, as he often did, an Oriental carpet to make his point. Then he said, in effect: this is what we have lost the capacity to make, and until we recover it, we have no business calling ourselves a culture.

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May 15, 2026

Savonnerie, Aubusson, Gobelins: The Three Ateliers That Defined What Europe Believed a Rug Could Be

In the final years of the sixteenth century, the treasury of France was hemorrhaging. Not to war alone though there had been enough of that but to the East. French silver was flowing steadily toward Persia and the Levant in exchange for knotted-pile carpets, objects of such refinement and such authority that no European workshop had yet produced anything capable of competing with them. Henri IV, who had survived the Wars of Religion and the bankruptcy of a kingdom to sit on the French throne, was not a man inclined to accept a problem he could solve. He installed Pierre Dupont — weaver, entrepreneur, and the most technically accomplished carpet-maker in France in the galleries of the Louvre itself, in workshops beneath the palace's own roof, with a single instruction: make something that does not require us to send money to Persia.

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Woven Histories

NO. B239

Lynne Cooke (ed.)

$65

Available: Shipping as Soon as Tomorrow

University of Chicago Press, 2023

"Rug & Kilim has been a pleasure to work with from the very start of our relationship. Not only is their service outstanding, their inventory of one of a kind vintage rugs is unparalleled."

— Alan Eckstein and Margaret Goddard, Somerset House

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View Similar

Specifications:

Measurements: 0'9" x 0'11" ( 0.24 m x 0.28 m )
Categories: Textile, Volumes
Classification: Modernist (20th Century), Tapestry & Textile
SKU: B239

Inquire About this Volume

Woven Histories

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Stories from the Volumes Collection

Rug & Kilim’s Tapestry Artists’ Series: In Dialogue with Joanne Soroka

Rug & Kilim’s Tapestry Artists’ Series: In Dialogue with Jeni Ross

Rug & Kilim’s Tapestry Artists’ Series: In Dialogue with Elizabeth Chester

The Layered Home: 5 Ways to Rethink Floor Rugs and Wall Tapestries

What William Morris, Paul Poiret, and the Bauhaus Each Understood About the Rug and What French Art Deco Proved

Savonnerie, Aubusson, Gobelins: The Three Ateliers That Defined What Europe Believed a Rug Could Be

Woven Histories

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