Created in partnership with the Museum of International Folk Art and the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Mohawk Group introduced the Celebrated Heritage: a soft surface portfolio that brings the vitality of living artistic traditions to a broad range of spaces and projects. With the goal of creating a visually intriguing and richly textured collection, Mohawk Group’s design team focused their search of the museums’ collections on textiles, basketry, and pottery of the native cultures of the Southwestern US and of Mexico.
From the honeycombed texture of ceramics by the Ancestral Puebloan peoples of the Southwestern U.S., and the delicate intricacy of woven baskets by the Hupa people of Northern California, to the layered Bargello geometry of a 19th century woven cloth from Mexico and a woven fiber matt from Indonesia, these artistic motifs and techniques form a continuous line of communication amongst these cultures and their people. These various forms of aesthetics articulate each given culture’s identity and serve to inspire the new generation of artisans.
As a floorcovering collection, where aesthetic considerations must always be matched by utility, Celebrated Heritage also carries strong parallels with the utilitarian roots of craft traditions. The patterns in Celebrated Heritage thoughtfully incorporate abstract explorations of these evolving design traditions rather than simply reproducing specific pieces.
“Celebrated Heritage bears witness to the continuous interpretative work that enables a culture to sustain a craft, and a craft to sustain vital elements of a culture,” says Pamela Kelly, Museum of New Mexico Foundation’s vice president of licensing and brand management, “We hope that specifiers choose Celebrated Heritage for their next projects and that the collection inspires creativity within their spaces.”
As with all our collaborations, a portion of the proceeds from Celebrated Heritage supports the Museum of International Folk Art and the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in their mission to preserve and promote the artistic and craft traditions of the world’s artisans.
