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Germantown Men's Wearing Blanket
by Charlene Laughing, Navajo
Artist Bio
Description: Natural and commercial dyes on commercial wool; woven on traditional upright Navajo loom.
About this Award: Awarded to acknowledge excellence in craftsmanship in all forms of weaving. Baskets, rugs and other fiber arts are eligible.
Jurors’ Comments:
Susan Folwell: It’s a beautiful weave; the color combination; it’s just technically well done. The color combination I think is very sophisticated. I realize this can tend to be sort of a generic pattern but I think the artist’s use of coloration was handled exceptionally well. It’s very pleasing.
Martin Kim: I picked this because, in the context of all the entries that show trends in Navajo weaving today; there’s a level of visual complexity that’s coming to dominate the styles and designs of so many new rugs, that I feel it is almost uncontrolled. It’s too much information; it’s too much display of “Look what I can do.” I think there is technical mastery in all the rugs that were presented here, but the one with the slight conceit of quoting the Germantown style has something going for it that I really like, and that’s brevity. It is the use of color in it that enlivens this otherwise very simple pattern, and it deserves recognition for that, flying in the face of the marketplace.
Mark Bahti: This is my second choice. To be honest I realize that one of the reasons that put me off initially was the conceit of the identification of the style of the pattern. But putting that aside, the background is very pleasing to my eye. The hotter red in it going to scarlet is what my eye kept snagging on and tilted me towards the Crystal.
(About the Runner-up, his choice, the Crystal rug) I looked at the nine-in-one rug. It’s really different for that style in that usually they’re right up against one another and these are floating against a field, which is nice. But it’s not at all uncommon. This one, for a Crystal, was a little different with the panels in it and it had both symmetry and asymmetry going on. Symmetry to the extent that it has an identifiable pattern on the diagonal; but asymmetry going on in that as you go up or down and sweep across as the eye normally does, you get some randomness so when your eye gets to the point where it’s looking for the irregularity or asymmetry it can find it, but at the same time there’s a visual feel that compensates for it. It’s unusual. Usually, if you see these kinds of panels at all they tend to be boxed in rather than having this terraced motif on it. And you almost never see it with a Crystal pattern. You can see it in a banded Wide Ruins element. Some of the elements are from old style Crystal rugs. So it was a nice arrangement overall, a pleasing combination of colors, which isn’t easy to do. Sometimes you end up with a color too weak or too strong on it. [The Crystal rug later won the Award of Excellence in Textiles.]
Photo by Marnie Sharp