Most people associate rug design with Persian carpets produced in modern workshops operated by rug weavers who are exclusively men. Carpet-weaving is not easy. Only the truly dedicated can hope to fashion an artful rug. Most women have left carpet-weaving because of falling prices and a crumbling support system. Still, a few slogs along for meager pay, for the sake of their families. Today, carpet-weaving is counted among the most classical forms of art, but who among the artistically inclined are aware that the earliest designs were created by women who did not sign or initial their works? It is crucial to remember and honor the significant contributions that female weavers have made to the art market of vintage and antique rugs.

Artist-designed rugs are nothing new. “In the sixteenth century and before, weavers all through the Arab world were seen as artists by the court, and they wove their names into their designs,” says Jaime Odabachian, owner of the eponymous (though differently spelled) ODABASHIAN, a custom handmade rug company that celebrates its 100th birthday this year. “Textiles have always been seen as art. They're just made in another medium.”

Previously, we find textile art in the hands of women since the Middle Ages, where jewel fabric , such as the Bayeux Tapestry or the Tapestry of Creation were made by the Benedictine nuns of Girona, both from the 12th century, which they did not only enrich but changed the very conception of Roman art.

Still, we do not tend to think of rugs as the work of individual designers or artisans any more than, say, a piece of pottery we instinctively turn over in search of a mark. This is changing as large and small rug companies are increasingly collaborating with established and emerging artists and designers.

Artist-designed rugs thrived in the middle decades of the 20th century, thanks to pioneering (and wealthy) Paris-based entrepreneur and gallery owner Marie Cutolli, who worked on pieces with some of the giants of modernism. She began commissioning artwork in the 1920s from Fernand Léger, Jean Lurcat, Louis Marcoussis and Pablo Picasso, with which she had pile rugs made in Algerian weaving workshops, says Cindy Kang, associate curator at Philadelphia's Barnes Foundation, who organized the museum's 2020 exhibition “ Marie Cuttoli: the Modern Thread from Miró to Man Ray.” (The show was sadly truncated by the coronavirus outbreak, but the catalog is available on the museum's website.) In the 1930s, Kang continues, Cuttoli commissioned new art from Picasso, Joan Miró and Le Corbusier.

Among 20th-century female textile artists we find figures from the Bauhaus movement such as Anni Albers, who successfully combined textile craftsmanship with industrial production and abstract modernist design. We can also find Gunta Stolz, a great weaving artist, who focused on the design and weaving of abstract textiles to which she also made commercial and industrial use. Besides, Gunta was a teacher in the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus and made a very significant contribution to the development of the school's weaving workshop.
Dörte Helm was a textile artist who worked with Gropius and contributed to the Bauhaus exhibition with a four-part textile screen and geometric tapestry; Benita Koch-Otte, who created through embroidery. She also worked in designing interiors, a career she shares with Lilly Reich, although the latter figure is better known as a designer of interiors and objects, among which the design of the Barcelona Chair stands out (along with Mies van der Rohe) or the Brno Chair. Also the Bauhaus artist Kitty van der Mijll Dekker devoted herself to textile design and her tea towel is still being produced for the TextielMuseum in Tilburg.

Brigita Krasauskaitė is a textile designer from Lithuania. Brigita’s work resists the cheapened product that results from rampant consumerism and the drive to have everything instantly. Her rugs are the end result of a long process of creation that spans the globe and benefits from collaboration with a worldwide team of women. Combining the intellects of women of varied esthetical and artistic backgrounds and tastes, Brigita strives to create a platform for a union of expression that combines contemporary Western design and the rigor of ancient Eastern craft practices.

To date, Krasauskaitė’s rug designs have mediated at the intersection between the status of women throughout the world and the natural rhythms and landscape geometries that inspire artists to express the ineffable.

https://percarin.com/designers-r-1 

https://www.1stdibs.com/introspective-magazine/rug-collaborations/