When a Rug Is More Than Just a Rug

The one downside of the exhibition RugLife, on view through April 20 at the Museum of Craft and Design, is that you cannot touch the art. In a group show of technicolor textiles, lusciously thick piles and sculptural weavings, the urge to run one’s hands over the wall-hanging rugs, especially, is difficult to contain. (I don’t think I’m the only one starved for texture in a world of slick surfaces and shiny screens.)

The truth is there’s plenty more going on in RugLife than sensory evocation. The show, guest curated by Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox, features the work of 14 contemporary, international artists whose rugs engage with issues as wide-ranging as climate change, geopolitics and upended cultural traditions.

To accomplish this, several artists take advantage of the rug’s inherent three-dimensionality. In one of the show’s opening pieces, Liselot Cobelen’s California Drought (from the Dryland series), geographic features are rendered in different pile heights, creating a fluffy topographical map in gradations of green, brown, white and blue. The effect is psychologically scrambling, acting as both a welcome and an indictment: Here is a soft, luxurious textile work that documents the damage we’ve done to our natural landscape.

Conversely, Andrea Zittel’s Carpet Furniture: Drop Leaf Table is exceedingly flat — made of that rough, barely-there carpet that signals, more than anything, “easy to clean.” A dyed design on the carpets’ surface shows the layout of a dining table and eight chairs, two place-settings laid out as examples on their nonexistent placemats.

It’s an enigmatic piece. Is it a template for home furnishing, or a replacement for furniture itself? Much in the way designers of interior spaces seek to engineer the interactions within them, it could be that reducing a centerpiece of family life to utter flatness might actually allow for new, anarchical relationships to form. (It’s worth noting there is no head of the table in Zittel’s layout.)

Rugs, it’s clear by now, are potent symbols of home, comfort and belonging. They fill domestic space and demarcate it. They roll up and move to new places, bringing with them a reminder of their former locales. One of the most poetic pieces in the show comes from Stéphanie Saadé. With Stage of Life, the artist stretches a family carpet brought from Lebanon to fit a new space, slicing it into dozens of thin strips so that it fills the exact distance of her Paris apartment’s hallway.

It’s a simple, beautiful gesture that captures the elongated feelings of homesickness and nostalgia — a pulling toward a past and a place now out of reach.

Other standouts in RugLife include Ali Cha’aban’s Grandpa’s Monobloc, a Persian rug–covered plastic chair imbued with throne-like regality; Sonya Clark’s Comb Carpet, a tactility seductive “weaving” made from hundreds of black plastic combs; and Oksana Levchenya’s Pac-Man and Cossacks, a traditional kylym rug with some delightfully non-traditional imagery. And be sure to spend some quality time with Azra Akšamija’s mesmerizing animation, a glitchy, shimmery representation of Yugoslavia’s art history.

RugLife is, in all, a perfect Museum of Craft and Design show, and a great reminder of the importance of this small museum in the Bay Area’s cultural landscape. Don’t let the overly punny exhibition title — or its subtitle, “covering new ground” (groan) — keep you away. The MCD is doing the work so many institutions struggle to do: connecting poignant artistic efforts to the familiar, everyday objects in our own lives.

‘RugLife’ is on view at the Museum of Craft and Design (2569 Third St., San Francisco) through April 20, 2025.