Kashan rug c. 1910

This Kashan rug was made by an anonymous artist, and it's now housed at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Looking at this rug, I'm thinking about all the individual knots. Can you imagine making each one, and what that must have been like? The maker would have built up this field of warm, earthy tones and intricate patterns. It looks like a kind of private meditation worked out on a very public scale. I'm thinking how different it is from slinging paint around a canvas, but maybe not that different—you’re still building something from the ground up. There's a rhythm to how these patterns repeat. Each repeat isn’t identical, it has its own wobble, its own individual variation. Each knot, like a brushstroke, is a decision, a tiny assertion of will. It's a kind of conversation, a call and response. In the end, art is always about artists communicating with each other, across time, inspiring new generations to keep the conversation going.