Something From Nothing

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The exhibition is set up like a family’s living room, with furniture emblazoned with photographs and text.

“The images are mostly of people and the text comes from interviews I did with people with eating disorders and people who are close to people with eating disorders,” said Joy Christiansen Erb, assistant professor of photography at Youngstown State University whose “Family Gathering: A Look into the World of Eating Disorders,” opening next week at Miami University’s Hiestand Gallery, investigate the psychological and emotional effects of eating disorders.

“Eating disorders are often talked about in the media, but at the personal level, it’s often kept quiet,” she said, so her art makes an attempt to move the conversation from the tube to the living room.

“I first thought about how secretive eating disorders are,” she said. “They live in the home. So I created a desk to represent the mind and had things tucked away in the drawers so when you pulled them open and re-arranged things on the desk you could see more images and text.”

After that, she moved on to chairs to represent a counseling session. Facing each other, one chair expressed a professional, educating voice while the other had “a needy, raw” voice, she said.

She created the room of furniture for a traveling exhibition called “Share Your Voice” in 2005.

Her goal, she said, is to “help people, especially students, talk about their eating disorders and open up that dialogue.”

how to go

• WHAT: “Family Gathering,” an installation by Joy Christiansen Erb
• WHERE: Hiestand Gallery, Miami University, Oxford
• WHEN: Oct. 21-Nov. 5
• COST: No charge
• MORE INFO: (513) 529-1883

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One interesting thing about the Humana Festival is that the Actors Theatre of Louisville decorates its halls with art exhibitions. Last year they had giant earthenware water pots. This year it was "The Artists of Lowertown Paducah, Kentucky," paintings and sculptures from artists working in Paducah.

My nomination for  Best of Show, above, is this encaustic painting by Nikki May titled  "Vosro/Mio," which I think is Italian for "Yours/Mine." I'm a sucker for the female figure anyway, but I really like the muted colors and the soft, flowing lines. There's something sexy about wax, too, the way it looks like skin.

I also enjoyed the whimsical "Mixed media with string and staples on paper" by Teri Moore, titled "Mom Says" (below, click on it to get a more detailed view).

I didn't see an explanation at the gallery, but a little Internet research tells me that Paducah has worked hard in the last few years to attract artists in some kind of relocation program. May came there from Atlanta and Moore from Chicago. 

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In 1965, Bernie Kleina, a conscientious young Catholic priest in Chicago, read about the aborted civil-rights march from Selma, Ala., that was cut short by an attack by state troopers and the local county sheriff, a day now referred to as “bloody Sunday.”

So when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made a national plea for people from all over the nation to join them for a second attempt the following Tuesday, March 9, Kleina went, joining some 2,500 other protesters.

“I saw marchers beaten up and turned back,” he said. “We’d march to City Hall every day, and on Friday we were sent out into the community to demonstrate in a most subtle way. We didn’t carry any signs, but we were a racially mixed group of people walking through the neighborhood.”

That was enough to get Kleina arrested, and he spent some time in the local jail, but there were so many arrested that authorities didn’t know what to do with them all. Kleina was shortly released, but his picture was on the front page of the Selma newspaper.

“Selma was an awakening for me,” he said. “I thought discrimination was something that just happened in the South, but going down there opened my eyes.

“It’s embarrassing to think about now, but I grew up in a white neighborhood, a white school and was sadly oblivious to racial issues.”

When Kleina returned home, he got involved in the civil-rights movement, especially in the area of open housing.

“This was a more difficult hurdle than opening up lunch counters,” he said. “Housing free of discrimination was hard to find, and everything else depends upon it.

“Housing determines what kind of education the kids will have, the dangers they’re exposed to and what opportunities for a better life they will have.”

When King came to Chicago later in 1965, Kleina decided to take his camera to a march in Marquette Park to document the event, in part to dispel the notion that it was the demonstrators that were causing the violence during the marches and protests.

“Prior to that, I never really took any photographs, except for family photos,” he said.

“I did my best,” he said. “Now, I don’t think I’d go to these things with just one or two rolls of film, but maybe because of that I was more careful about what I shot. If I’d known what I was doing, I also would have shot in black and white because the film was faster and you could do a lot more with it.”

At Marquette Park, the Chicago police formed a ring around the marchers, separating them from the mob there to counter-protest.

“The white mob would throw things over the heads of the policemen to hit the marchers,” Kleina said. “In the South, in many or most instances it was the police that reacted violently to the marchers. In the North, the police were generally complacent, and it was the white mob who were the violent ones. At least, I didn’t see the Chicago police beat up any marchers, but they apparently left it up to the mob.”

The photos he took that day have subsequently been exhibited across the country and will be a major feature of the African Culture Fest this weekend at the Cincinnati Museum Center.

“In some of the photos you can see the anger in the faces of the people who opposed the marchers and in the marchers you can see a certain amount of discipline,” he said. “Marchers weren’t allowed to have cameras and couldn’t even carry a banner or a placard. Most of the marchers would dress in suits. It was taken very seriously because they wanted the attention to be on the issues, not the marchers.”

That experience was equally as influential on Kleina’s life. He eventually gave up the priesthood, but continues to work for equal rights today as the director of the Hope Fair Housing in Wheaton, Ill.

BERNIE KLEINA, who joined with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others during marches in the 1960s, captured these photos of King. Kleina’s photographs are part of the African Culture Fest’s “Martin Luther King Comes North: A Fight for Fair Housing” exhibit, which will remain on view through March 9 at the Cincinnati Museum Center.
 

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A Monroe photographer’s fictional scene of a “Backyard Tragedy” has been selected for the “Trick of the Light” exhibition at Cincinnati’s Manifest Gallery.

As part of a class project at the Antonelli Institute for Photography, Francis Michaels chose backyards as a location topic and sought to create something “dark and moody” and ironic.

“We think of backyards as safe places, where tragedies don’t usually happen,” he said. “I set the whole thing up. There are no bodies, no blood, but the photos give you the impression that there might have been a body or that something bad has happened.”

The series of photos, currently at four, can be seen at his web site, www.fjmphotography.com. Of the two he submitted, one titled “Spirit,” was chosen by curator Dennis Kiel, former curator of photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

The exhibition called for photographs that revealed “the power of light-based imagery to communicate, express, or evoke a visceral first-hand experience as strong as any painting or sculpture exhibit.”

Kiel, now Chief Curator at the Light Factory in Charlotte, N.C., said that “Spirit” was a good example of using light for a dramatic narrative effect.

“The mystery is there, that something has happened or just about to happen,” he said. “Even without the title, you’d be fascinated by it.”

Michaels also currently has photography on exhibit at the Sweet Art of Mine Gallery in West Chester, where he will be on hand at an open house, 4 to 8 p.m., Dec. 21.

• WHAT: “Trick of the Light: Contemporary Photography”
• WHERE: Manifest Gallery and Drawing Center, 2727 Woodburn Ave., Cincinnati
• WHEN: Opening reception 6 to 9 p.m. today; exhibition continues through Jan. 11
• COST: No charge
• MORE INFO: (513) 861-3638; www.manifestgallery.org

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Commentary

The New York Times reports that 15 people were injured by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo's installation "Shibboleth" during its first eight weeks at the Tate Modern museum in London.

The installation consists of a giant crack in the floor meant to address "a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world."

A "shibboleth," according to tate.org, is "a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group."

I suppose that means those who can't see a giant crack in the floor and trip on it should be excluded from the ranks of art patrons.

What I liked about the Times story, however, was a couple of quotes:

A kiwi woman who tripped and fell during the reporter's visit and suffered a couple of bruises:   “I just didn’t see it... I don’t think it should be there at all... It’s not America, so I won’t sue.”

And this from a 29-year-old businessman visiting from Serbia:  “Art is dangerous sometimes.”

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It’s been a good year for New York artist Omar Chacón. For the first time, he’s been able to live off of his art without a second job, due partly to a solo exhibition in Sarasota, Fla., a major group show in California, and the award of the $10,000 William and Dorothy Yeck Award as the winner of the Miami University Young Painters Competition.

In addition to the cash, the award includes an exhibition of his work, and 29 paintings will be part of the exhibition “Sancochos Casiqueños a la Cimabue,” opening next week at the Hiestand Galleries.

The title of the show refers in part to a traditional soup from his native Columbia that blends elements of Spanish dishes with indigenous ingredients, because like the soup, his work uses different elements to create something new.

“It’s a celebration of paint, but it’s driven by an investigation of culture, of the people coming together,” he said in a phone interview.

His signature motif — the layering of dots of paint on a canvas — was inspired by a visit to his grandfather in Colombia while he was in college.

“My grandfather in his life made a few paintings and when I went to visit him in Columbia he did a little dot painting,” Chacón said. “He told me, ‘I don’t want to paint like anybody else,’ he said, and it wasn’t. He just made the painting out of his own creative mind.

“I thought about all the people I went to school with, appropriating ideas from other artists, flipping through art magazines. So I thought, ‘I can rip off my own blood, can’t I?’”

The Miami University competition solicits works from U.S. residents ages 25-35 who have achieved “a significant degree of success as an emerging artist of noteworthy talent.”  

In addition to the purchase award, Chacón becomes a part of the Miami Best Young Painters of the 21st Century collection.

Winners of this year’s competition will be announced at a reception, 5:15 p.m. Friday, Jan. 18, at Hiestand.  Juror for the competition is Peter Plagens, art critic for Newsweek magazine.  Plagens, based in New York, is a Dayton native who also is an author, artist and educator.

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Even to many artists who are creatively engaged on a daily basy, the creative process is a mystery.

“Because I teach painting and drawing, I’m often witness to the difficulties of a creative situation,” said Miami University art professor Dana Saulnier.

To that end, he proposed an exhibiton at the Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati to take entries from artists about work that speaks to the process, about how creativity is not just about intuition, but “about a lot of work,” he said, and to explore the resistance to creativity that arises during the work.

“Creative work seems to be 90 percent resistance and 10 percent success,” he said. “In other areas we are efficient in our time, but creativity takes you down some alleys.”

Part of the resistance seems to come from an artist’s inability to express exactly what he or she wants to express.

Resistance to Vision as an organizing principle for this exhibition arises out of a number of ideas and observations-- all having to do with thinking about creative practices. A lot of this comes directly out doing creative work, as well as helping others find their own artistic voice. The same thinking also lends itself to an argument that distinguishes the visual in the face of contemporary theories that center on language. For several generations much theory has taken the operation of language as the fundamental framework for understanding cultural forms. The “linguistic turn” in theory is the prevalent mode of postmodernism. This project compiles a set of ideas meant to position “resistance” and “blindness” as productive orientations to the visual. – Dana Saulnier in the introduction to the exhibition catalog 

“A person who works from observation, for instance, who is making a drawing of you would encounter some resistance because we can only get so much of you on paper,” he said. “Some things about you are not visible, and that’s hard to render,” so the artist meets resistance.

The call for entries to “Resistance to Vision” generated nearly 350 entries from 130 artists from 30 states and nine different countries. From that, Saulnier selected 16 works from artists in eight different states, including Kenneth Hall of Oxford.

“We wanted to see evidence of the artist’s thinking,” he said. “The idea of trail and error was very important. We wanted to see their choices.”

In a set of self-portraits title "Eight Days, Orange Shirt," for instance, Texas artist Joseph Morzuch painted himself in eight 8-by-8-inch panels, always wearing the same shirt, always with a similar expression.

“Each one of them has a bit of truth,” Saulnier said, but none of the them tell the whole story.

A public lecture by Saulnier to accompany this exhibit will be held 6 p.m. Nov. 29 in room 5401 at the University of Cincinnati, College of DAAP.

A 48 page exhibit catalog features an 11 page curatorial essay by Saulnier.

WHAT: Resistance to Vision: Searching, Sifting, Finding, Seeing
WHERE: Manifest Gallery and Drawing Center, 2727 Woodburn Avenue, Cincinnati
WHEN: Through Dec. 7
COST: No charge
MORE INFO:  (513) 861-3638; http://www.manifestgallery.org

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“You can’t be afraid of color if you’re around me too long,” said Nancy Berninger, whose bright landscapes now dominate the lobby gallery at the Fitton Center for Creative Arts.

Berninger turned to painting about 11 years ago, she said, after having raised her children and decided to turn her dabbling into a career. Studying under area teachers like Sandy Maudlin and Steve Perucca, she tried her hand at watercolors and oils before settling on acrylics as her medium of choice.

“I left watercolors because I like the physicality of acrylics, the interaction with the canvas,” she said. “I put the canvas up in my barn and I can go wild. Painting give me the freedom to explore and no one can tell me what to do. I’m free.”

She said she also likes to crank up the heavy metal music when she works, her favorites being AC/DC and the indie rock band National.

“It gives me courage,” she said, “lets me out of the box.”

She likes to work fast, she said, and with “generous amounts of paint,” sometimes beginning with a photograph she’s taken or a small pastel sketch she drew, or sometimes just out of her imagination.

“I don’t really have a fixed approach,” she said. “My work is spontaneous and I don’t fiddle with it too much.

“There are a lot of painters out there, but very few artists,” she said. “An artist has an identity of their own they can express, the don’t need to copy anyone else.”

Photos by Greg Lynch/JournalNews staff photographer 

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The lifestyle of the Eskimo and Inuit people of the Arctic north is inextricably tied to the weather.

“Living in a harsh climate, these people were still able to create utilitarian pieces with an artistic quality that rivals pieces made by other indigenous cultures of the world,” said Roger Fry, whose collection of artifacts is included in the exhibition “The Lure of the Arctic,” now on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

Fry and his wife Elizabeth first began collecting Eskimo and Inuit artifacts about 40 years ago, he said, a detour from collecting Norther Plains and Southwest Native American artifacts.

“We started collecting during our travels through the West, but Native American pieces became quite expensive, so we started buying more from Alaska, Northern Canada, Greenland and even Russia,” he said. “These people were able to make objects from wood, bone and ivory of all descriptions.

“We began acquiring pieces we were interested in displaying and to let other people see how artistic and talented they are.”

Some 200 pieces from the Frys’ collection explore the adaptive lifestyles of the Arctic people, supplemented by 19th century artifacts drawn from the art museum’s collection, including 19th century artifacts assembled by naturalist Edward W. Nelson, one of the first ethnographers to document the lifestyles of native Alaskan peoples.

“Explorers such as Nelson were responsible for some of the oldest ethnographic collections found today in museums worldwide,” said Glenn Markoe, curator of Classical and Near Eastern Art and Arts of Africa and the Americas.

The objects are presented in functional groupings, allowing visitors to get a closer look at how North American Arctic peoples used them for everyday pursuits, including hunting and fishing, recreation and a variety of domestic and social activities.  

Also featured in the exhibition are an authentic kayak and an Eskimo umiak, an open boat made of walrus hides stretched on a wooden frame – both of which bear testimony to the technical ingenuity and craftsmanship of the North American Arctic people.

• WHAT: The Lure of the Arctic: Eskimo and Inuit Artifacts from the W. Roger and Patricia K. Fry Collection
• WHERE: Cincinnati Art Museum, 653 Eden Park Drive, Cincinnati
• WHEN: Through Jan. 20
• COST: No charge
• MORE INFO: www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org

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By 1890, all of the Indians had been removed to the reservations and the White Man no longer saw him as a savage, but as noble beings living a traditional and archaic way of life.

“There was no collective guilt about what the White Man had done to destroy their way of life,” said Anita Ellis, a Cincinnati Art Museum curator speaking on “Vanishing Frontier.” “But there was a sense of collective sympathy because they had lost their way of life.”

Ellis said 1890 was a notable year because the U.S. Census had determined that there was no more land left to settle, and the act of taming the frontier — the courage it required and the “can-do” spirit that it employed — had up until that time determined the “American character,” the only thing that set the United States culture apart from European culture.

“It was a time for people to determine 'What is American?’” she said. “At the same time, the United States was experiencing the paradigm shift from the agrarian way of  life to the industrial. The urban areas were becoming increasingly crammed and the pollution deadly. So white Americans began looking nostalgically at what they perceived to be an easier way of life.”

Artist Henry Farny, originally from western Pennsylvania, took a trip west in 1881 and came back with a large collection of Native American artifacts along with his own drawings and photographs that inspired his work for the rest of his life as he settled in Cincinnati to work.

At the same time, the Cincinnati-based Rookwood pottery company discovered that images of the noble Indians were just the ticket to get more men to purchase their wares.

Consequently, Farny and the Rookwood artists had a big influence on the way the rest of America saw the natives, even though it wasn’t necessarily an accurate portrayal.

“Vanishing Frontier” contains 39 Farny paintings and 52 examples of rookwood pottery along with 35 pieces of authentic Indian artifacts from the period in an attempt to help separate the facts from the legends.

• WHAT: “Vanishing Frontier: Rookwood, Farny and the American Indian
• WHERE: Cincinnati Art Museum, 953 Eden Park Dr., Cincinnati
• WHEN: Through Jan. 20
• COST: $8 adults; $6 students/seniors; $4 children
• MORE INFO: (513) 721-2787; www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org

 

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Althea Murphy-Price likes to keep people guessing, so it may take a while to figure out what the primary media are in her exhibition “Artificial.”

Here’s a hint: You’ll find it on your head, but not really.

There are two types of work in the exhibition. On the wall are lithographic prints, each comprised of innumerable fine lines. In the middle of the Hiestand Gallery is a larger installation that appears similar, but the material creating the lacy image is not printed on the base, but simply lying there, tiny black fibers on a white background.

“These were intended to be installed in a salon or barbershop,” she said, “the remnants of another creative process.”

Yes, Murphy-Price makes art out of hair. But it’s artificial hair, not human, although it’s meant to appear so.

“The concept of artificiality and falsity is something I think about,” she said. “I associate hair with identity and culture, and I use it to talk about personal relationships to culture.

“I also like the concept of hair as something we prize, but also something that can be seen as dirty or disgusting.”

She created the pattern by placing a lacy table cloth on the base, then sprinkling it with finely cut pieces of hair, giving it an sense of fragility, “to be both something and nothing,” she said. The prints take that technique a step further by making it a permanent image.

“This work is similar to how people would use hair as a way of remembering,” she said. “The majority of my work is about my feelings on memory and time.”

The table cloth, for instance, revisits some of her earliest memories of things she saw in her grandmother’s closet.

“That’s where I got my first interest in art and being an artist,” she said.

• WHAT: “Artificial” by Althea Murphy-Price
• WHERE: Hiestand Galleries, Hiestand Hall, Miami University, Oxford
• WHEN: Through Nov. 14
• COST: No charge
• MORE INFO: (513) 529-1883; www.fna.muohio.edu/galleries

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Miami University Art Museum

Sara Butler, Miami University professor of art, will lead a discussion titled "Camouflage and Beyond: When Dress Meets War" at 4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 1, at the art museum.

Continue reading "Material Culture in the Context of War" »

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Cincinnati Art Museum

Rembrandt presents himself to the world as a young man, a self-made burgher and an old master painter this spring at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Three extraordinary self-portraits by Rembrandt van Rijn, one of the greatest masters in the history of Western art, will be presented together for the first time at the Cincinnati Art Museum from March 8 to May 21, 2008. Rembrandt: Three Faces of the Master will feature three landmark paintings on loan from the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The Louvre’s masterpiece painting will travel to the U.S. for the first time for this exclusive showing in Cincinnati.

Continue reading "Rembrandt coming to Cincinnati" »

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Manifest Gallery

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Chrissy Collopy makes it up as she goes along, improvising with paint and canvas the way a jazz saxophone player finds the pocket and grooves.

“Mostly, I start on the canvas and just keep going with my feeling and as things come to me,” said the Oxford artist. “I appreciate a lot of thing in  nature and that’s where my inspiration comes from.

“You go into your zone and release yourself, cement yourself to a higher power and the energy that is all around you, so that it all becomes part of you. It’s really hard to explain because it’s something bigger than myself.

Sometimes, the images come so fast that she doesn’t even know herself what the painting is about until she steps back and starts analyzing it herself and with a black marker writes notes on the white edges of the canvas frames.

“Sometimes, the meaning of the painting doesn’t even come to me until I get the text out,” she said. “I can’t ever say myself when a painting is done because it will tell me.”

And when she starts telling visitors the story of a painting, it comes out almost trance-like, a stream-of-consciousness poem: “You see Everywoman and a man coming together as lovers. You see her sisters below and they’re jealous for the love that she has. Blood is thicker than water. Butterflies and swans eyeing her, seeing all of her life and death, opening a window through all time. This is the person in her love that lights the fire that warms the soul,” she said of one of her newer paintings titled “Soul Food.”

For her solo show Friday evening at the Creative Gallery in Cincinnati, Collopy chose the title “Reflections” after she realized that not only are her paintings reflections of her own life, but also that reflected images figure prominently in her latest work.

“It came to me,” she said, “but I can’t say I wasn’t mindful of it already because I had already started working on it in my paintings.”

In addition to nature, Collopy said she finds inspiration in the works of Salvador Dali, Picasso, Gustav Klimt, Georgia O’Keefe and British painter Cecily Brown.
Born in northern Indiana, Collopy’s family moved around a lot because her father had “itchy feet,” as he likes to say.

When she was 14, he moved to New Mexico and she stayed in Oxford. It was also around that time that she started taking art seriously.

“That was the age when I realized that I can’t separate myself from art,” she said. “I painted for fun as a kid and never stopped. I wrote and drew in sketchbooks and I realized that I was getting pretty good at it, but I’m still learning.

When she was 20, she took some classes at Miami University when she was 20 from Lon Beck in Oxford and Ed Montgomery in Hamilton, but soon gave up the academic path and began studying more informally with artists she knows, especially Bill Berry, who runs the art supply store in Oxford.

“I wanted to work on my own stuff and they want you to learn through the professor,” she said. “I felt like I just needed to paint and draw.”

how to go
WHAT: Reflections: A solo show by Chrissy Collopy
WHERE: Creative Gallery, 1319 Main St., Cincinnati
WHEN: 6 to 11 p.m. Sept. 28
COST: No admission fee
MORE INFO: www.chrissyart.4t.com/

 photos by Nick Daggy

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JournalNews feature

OXFORD — Long before oil began to dominate the world economy, the best-known commodity of the Middle East was the rug.

But rugs also had an important role in the local culture. Rug shops were the center of the community, the place where people would go to get the latest gossip, and rugs were the center of the home because in a culture without furniture, people sat on the floor.

“The carpets are important to the economy because they link people together,” said Christopher Kremmer, author of four books on Afghanistan and the Middle East, including “The Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad.” Kremmer was in Oxford for "The War Rugs Symposium," held in conjuction withthe Miami University Art Museum exhibition, “Tanks, Helicopters, Guns and Grenades: The Afghan War Rugs of 1980 - 2007.”

  “The book is really a portrait of the Muslim countries in a time of crisis, particularly Afghanistan and nearby countries,” he said. “I didn’t want to write a politcal tract or an academic analyis, but a book that general readers would enjoy and find an eye open about the history of the culture and the area.

“From the nomadic shepherds who move the sheep to the women who dye and spin the wool to the people who weave it into rugs, the carpet industry has managed to survive 30 years of conflict because it is a low-tech business that doesn’t depend on electricity,” he said.

Kremmer was a reporter for Australian radio and television when he was assigned to India in 1990. At the time, the Soviet war in Afghanistan was “the biggest story in my neighborhood,” so he began to focus his attention there and began to realize the importance of the rug industry and how it can serve as a metaphor for the bigger Middle East picture.

“Religion and politics tend to divide people, but the carpets are kind of a bridge,” he said. “If we can connect through the rugs, perhaps we can be one step closer to understanding the people who made them.”

In the 1980s, he said, the Soviets were “not very polite” in their treatment of the Afghani people.

“They would cleanse an entire village to get one person, so you had 3 million Afghanis living in Pakistan,” he said. “There was a great deal of misery and anger caused by this and a huge support for the anti-Soviet struggle.”

Although there is no precedent for rugs to carry political messages, refugee weavers began working imagery inspired by the Soviet occupation into their rugs, first as a way to rally Soviet resistance, then as a way of making money from the tourist trade. Some of the rugs in the museum exhibition serve as warnings to people to be aware of unexploded ordinances, illustrating what not to touch. Others contain maps and other images that detail the Soviet occupation, and later, the terrorist attacks against the United States in 2001.

Kremmer said he was in Kabul in 1992 when the mujahideen came back and ended the Soviet occupation.

“There was a huge celebration after 13 years of war and the night sky was lit with what they called ‘happy fire,’ people firing their guns in the air,” he said. “Forty-eight hours later, the gunfire was in the street again as people started fighting among themselves for control.

“The cities has been protected by the Soviets and so descended into chaos for the next five years as the struggle for control continued among the various factions,” he said.

The anti-Soviet rugs began to lose their relevance as people lost confidence in the mujahideen. Then in 1997, the Taliban came onto the scene.

“In the beginning for a lot of people, they represented law and order — a tough group, but they could maintain some control over the cities. But then they got involved with Al Qaida and tehy have no idea how the world works and the danger of using Afghanistan as a base of operations against U.S. interests,” he said.

“In the beginning, the rugs celebrated Islamic rebellion, but now they are more ambiguous. Some are pro-American, but I’ve never seen a pro-Taliban rug.

“These rugs are quite mysterious,” he said. “They haven’t been studied in any great detail, who made them and why, what are the messages. That’s why this exhibit is important.”
 

Photos by Nick Daggy 

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