About Integrations 

Women weavers have often driven histories of abstraction and symbolic representations in many regions of the world, including on the Great Plains. The use of a warp and weft to generate textiles, baskets, and rugs has often been sidelined in the visual arts and relegated to space of craft. Though occasionally acknowledged as sources of inspiration for modernist male abstract painters in Europe and North America, the topographic, spiritual and cultural underpinnings of the source materials are lesser known.  

Céline Condorelli spent several years exploring abstraction as women’s work through the legacy of the experimental and anti-colonial Casablanca Art School (1962-1974), which became an important place to re-think the relationship between art and craft, and to rewrite art history from a non-European point of view. Starting from the rich history of Amazigh (also known as Berber) material culture, and reconnecting it within an Afro-Arab context, students were able to explore without the limiting distinctions and hierarchies between various materials and techniques.  

These rugs honour the legacy of the Casablanca Art School and reverse a common museum practice of showing pieces such as textiles and illustrations as the inspiration for better-known artists in more widely coveted media like painting.