February 29, 2012
India has the best inventory of vintage and antique furniture—both institutional and domestic—I’ve ever seen. Especially deco and moderne (bench above) not to mention traditional Indian wooden furniture of various vintages.
June 27, 2011
The impulse in Berber rug-making to both interrupt and also loosely maintain a pattern seems unique in traditional textiles. If not unique, then it’s hard to name a tradition that equals Berber mastery of this particular tension.
February 11, 2009
While on the topic of Afghanistan, here are some examples of Afghani war rugs. Production of these pictorial rugs began in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion and persisted throughout the civil war and into the US invasion.
The so-called “afghan blanket” seems to go to Value Village to die. It’s hard to know which is more disturbing: the synthetic nature of the object itself, or the fact that it is still, amazingly, given everything that has happened over the last fifteen or more years, called an “afghan.” A search online to discover the origins of this craft object immediately turned up “The All American Denim Stripes Afghan.” No lie!
