NEW YORK.- The exhibition The Great Cover Up: American Rugs on Beds, Tables, and Floors, organized by Lee Kogan, curator of special exhibitions and public programs, is on view at the American Folk Art Museum from June 5, 2007, to September 9, 2007. This is the museum's first presentation in more than 40 years that traces the history of American rug making through different periods, forms, and techniques. Featuring approximately 65 rugs that span the end of the 18th through the mid-20th centuries, the exhibition is drawn from public and private collections.

The Great Cover-up includes many masterpieces that have rarely been on public view. Among the masterworks are the American Folk Art Museum's stunning 13-foot Appliquéd Carpet (c. 1860) and the magnificent Embroidered Carpet (1832-35) by Zeruah H. Guernsey Caswell from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other treasures from the American Folk Art Museum's collection include the striking Knitted Rug attributed to Elvira Hulett, a member of the Hancock Shaker community, whose design is a technical tour de force, and the graphic Pictorial Table Rug, that powerfully illustrates the strong link between church and home.

Rugs have been a ubiquitous presence in American homes since the seventeenth century. The impulse to cover interior surfaces has historically been both utilitarian and decorative. Early American rugs were yarn-sewn, shirred, appliquéd, and embroidered; later techniques included knitting, crocheting, and, most notably, hooking. "Because of their prominent placement in the home and the physical area they occupied, rugs became opportunities for strong visual statements," notes Ms. Kogan. As many surviving rugs attest, the best examples transcend function through the graphic power of their color and design as well as their technical virtuosity.

Hand-Sewn Rugs - Contrary to popular belief, the tradition of handcrafted American rugs descended from table tops and beds and finally to floors. Some of the earliest rugs were bedcovers made by women in their homes. Known as bed rugs, the name derives from the Norwegian “rugga” or “rogga” and also the Swedish “rugg,” and refers to a coarse fabric or pile covering. These monumental textiles were yarn sewn, a technique using a needle and wool threads in a running stitch, usually on a homespun linen or wool foundation. Though no seventeenth-century examples survive, references appear in American inventories and other documents from this period. The large-scale carnation motif and other foliate patterns from the Connecticut River Valley relate to English and European floral embroidery designs. One of the extraordinary bed rugs in the exhibition is an 1803 example in a palette of browns, gold, and red tones that vibrates dramatically on a black background. Bed rugs were symbols of wealth and status; they were rare, valuable, labor intensive to produce, and treasured by owners who used them during cold New England winters.

By the first quarter of the 19th century, applique had become a popular technique used to make table, hearth, and floor rugs. Appliqué involves cutting elements from one fabric and sewing them onto another larger foundation fabric. The technique lends itself to original geometric or pictorial compositions created through the use of applied elements, sometimes embellished with embroidery. The room-size Appliquéd Carpet is a highly unusual example of this technique because of its enormous scale and intricate floral imagery. The complexity of the design, the lavish use of color and the endearing center block of one blue bunny nibbling a dandelion animate the overall composition.

The Embroidered Carpet, a handmade masterpiece that is also known as the Caswell Carpet, was made in Castleton, Vermont. Monumental in scale, it is composed of 76 blocks with the addition of a detachable hearth size rug along one edge. The square-block construction was embroidered in chain stitch on a tambour frame. Tradition suggests that Zeruah Higley Guernsey used a wooden needle fashioned by her father, a maker of spinning wheels. Adorned with an elaborate imagery of stylized leaves, birds, and baskets of fruit, the all-embroidered carpet also features a few blocks of more naturalistic cats, puppies and an irresistible courting couple.

In the late nineteenth century a new type of appliqued rug, the wool button or “penny” rug, became popular. The name referred to the technique of wool-on-wool appliqués of circles of the same size or layers of graduated circles, sometimes outlined in embroidery, in various colors applied in limitless arrangements on backgrounds of rectangles, squares, ovals and hexagonals.

In Waldoboro, Maine, another unique rug style developed distinguished by its sculptural surface. These rugs are characterized by densely piled loops cut at different heights on a linen foundation fabric, thereby creating three-dimensional surfaces. The rugs often feature a central oval with ornamental designs and motifs of flowers, leaves, fruits, and lush baskets of fruits and flowers that are contained within florid, scrolled borders. This style became so identified with Waldoboro that any rug made elsewhere that is three-dimensional is called a "Waldoboro type."

Rug hooking is one of the few forms of needlework that is thought to have originated in North America. The tradition may have started in Maine and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. By the middle of the nineteenth century, hooking became the most popular technique for handmade rugs, in both numbers and pattern variety. This was largely due to the importation of burlap from India by about 1850. The coarse woven fabric made of fibers from the sturdy jute plant were used to make sacks for dry goods. The discarded sacks provided an inexpensive, easily available cloth for a rug foundation. Unlike earlier techniques that usually employed a needle, the new technique used a hooking tool. Thin strips of fabric or yarn, usually wool, were pulled through a grid foundation using a hook and leaving a loop on the surface. The pile was either left in loops or sheared. The flexibility of this technique could be used for simple geometrics but also encouraged the most original pictorials. Among the hooked rugs in the exhibition, Close Finish is a whimsical example of a popular pastime whereas the monochromatic palette and simplified abstract forms in the Solitary Tree resonated with the modernist sensibility of the early 20th century.

Capitalizing on the growing popularity of handmade rugs, in the 1860s an enterprising Maine tin peddler, Edward Sands Frost, introduced nearly two hundred preprinted patterns on burlap for hooked rugs. Frost’s success led other individuals and companies to print patterns, and by the early twentieth century prepackaged kits were widely available. Inspired by Frost, the Lion with Palms is an example of a rug pattern by Ebenezer Ross, another early entrepreneur. The packaged kits promoted rug hooking as a popular and authentically American craft. Although these were not original designs, creative rug hookers often altered the preprinted patterns to produce individualized results.