Feature Exhibits

Feature Exhibits pay tribute to the work of outstanding contemporary and historic artists. Each of these extensive collections offers a wonderful and rare opportunity to study closely the techniques, colors, designs, materials, and the in-depth story of talented artists.

Classes:  Rug Hooking Week offers classes relevant to these exhibits so that you may gain insight and learn techniques directly from the artist, authority, or curator. You will find more information on the classes listed with each exhibit and on the Retreat and Workshop pages.

Hooked Artwork Inspired by David Galchutt

This Feature Exhibit highlights the hooked artwork inspired by David Galchutt’s outstanding illustrations and paintings. Since 2014, more than seventy-five of David’s designs have been transformed into hooking patterns by LC’s Wool ‘n Silk. This hooked collection was created by talented artists across the country, who skillfully used fibers to captured David’s incredible details and wonderfully imaginative subjects. 

Several of the hooked works have been featured in Celebration of Hand-Hooked Rugs and Rug Hooking Magazine. Some are framed to be displayed like paintings, while others are multi-dimensional decor, like footstools.

David Galchutt is a native southern Californian, who has been living on the Oregon coast for about six years. He was an illustrator for over 30 years and designer in the giftware industry, all while pursuing his own art.

The inspiration for David’s work comes from many places like nature and travel, to name a few. As he travels, he takes countless photos of landscapes, old buildings, and even fashion design elements, which sometimes find their way into his children’s book illustrations as animals in fancy clothing. One might think his work is computer generated, but not true, David draws and paints each intricate detail - once done in water-based paints, he now prefers oil paints.

Curator: Leanne Sitler

(This is a juried exhibit, please contact Leanne at LCSWOOL@ptd.net by April 15, 2021, if you would like to submit your David Galchutt hooked work for consideration.) 

Classes:  To accompany this Feature Exhibit, we are offering a Retreat and Gallery Talk, for more information see our Retreat and Workshoppages.

Punch & Yarn 

This Feature Exhibit acknowledges the “punch tool” & “yarn”, alternatives to a “hook” & “wool strip” -commonly used in rug making. Did you know that the “punch” tool and “yarn” both have deep roots here in Ohio, going back to the 1800s? This exhibit will focus on both, historical and local male inventors and influencers, as well as the global and contemporary punch and yarn artists and business women. From Toledo, to Nantucket, to Vermont, then Canada, and beyond, take a trip back in time and then catapult into present day to view these stunning collections, and learn about the artists, inventors, and businesses that developed because of an alternative tool and alternative fiber --- Punch & Yarn!

This Feature Exhibit will include several components:

★Amy Oxford - Inventor of The Oxford Punch Needle and author of the newly released Punch Needle Rug Hooking - Your Complete Resource to Learn & Love the Craft. Amy has been a punch needle instructor for 35 years with a mission of reviving what was once a dying art. She has a passion for changing the way punch has been perceived. Amy teaches that punch needle rug hooking, like any craft, can be absolutely gorgeous and praise worthy when utilizing excellent technique, the finest and most interesting materials, and bringing artistry and creativity to the work. 

While the punch tool and use of yarn to make rugs may have originated in the 1880s, Amy’s collection is an important representation of how her modern tool, along with her contemporary style and yarns, are used to create today’s spectacular textile art. 

Curator: Amy Oxford

★Chéticamp – A small fishing community on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada, is well known for its French Acadian culture and deep-rooted traditions, one of which is rug hooking.

In the 1920s, Miss Lilian Burke, an American artist from New York, came to Cape Breton to teach art to the children of Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone inventor. Miss Burke eventually came to Chéticamp and taught the local women to dye their wool and use it in the hooked rugs that she designed. She then took the rugs to market in New York.

In the 1930s, Chéticamp women decided to make their own designs and sell their finished mats. As the tourist industry developed, craft shops selling locally made hooked rugs were sold everywhere in Chéticamp.

Chéticamp rugs are both unique and recognizable by their Cape Breton design motifs, colors, and materials - which are primarily yarn. With this collection, we hope to show you the importance of acknowledging, supporting, and continuing regional and traditional arts!

Curator: Lola LeLievre

★Claire Murray – In the late 1970s, Claire Murray discovered rug hooking. At first, the plan was to hook rugs to decorate her newly purchased Bed & Breakfast on Nantucket. But it didn’t take long before her rug making developed into a cottage industry and then an international empire focused on hooked rugs and home decor.

Claire’s rug designs are truly Americana --- a combination of classic coastal influences, colors, and motifs. Using rug yarn and a hook, she is inspired by the gardens, boats, harbors, arbors, and other typical Nantucket seaside scenery, which she gloriously captures in her work. 

This collection features beautiful hooked rugs made by her own hand, distinctive in her signature style, along with her phenomenal story of how she started and where she is today.

Curator: Claire Murray

★Deanne Fitzpatrick – As a third-generation rug maker, Deanne started hooking in her mid-twenties, with the goal of making rugs for her old farmhouse. What began as a purely practical craft developed into an art, and now a significant online presence, store, and resource for rug hookers around the globe.

Inspired by her years as a therapist and her attention to the beauty of her Nova Scotia countryside, her style has a meditative quality and a freedom from rules. It’s joyful, powerful and transformative.

Deanne has mastered the combining of a myriad of fibers into her work, one significant fiber is yarn. This collection is representative of her use of yarn, in a painterly way, to create stunning & textile art.

Curator: Deanne Fitzpatrick

★Ebenezer Ross & Ohio Connections – In the 1800s, the punch tool was invented as an implement for making hooked rugs, primarily with yarn, and to speed up the process. Ebenezer Ross, of Toledo, Ohio, is thought to be the first inventor. Was he? In this exhibit, we will reveal our findings. 

But what we will tell you is that Ebenezer, along with a significant number of other Ohioans, played a major role in art or craft of rug making from the 1800s to 1960s with their punch tool inventions, or as their U.S. patents commonly refer to them as “Fabric Turfing Implements”.

In honor of Rug Hooking Week’s 25th Anniversary, we pay homage to Ohio’s historic Punch & Yarn contributors. It’s a fascinating story filled with ingenuity, marketing strategies, and noteworthy changes to the world of rug making!  

Curator: Kathy Wright

★Contemporary Artists –This exhibit features some of the top contemporary punch artists of the day, both established, well known favorites and up-and-coming artists who have chosen the punch as their artistic medium. 

Be sure to join Amy’s Wednesday night Gallery Talk. View this exhibit with an expert in the field who can point out the similarities and differences between punch needle and traditional rug hooking. Amy will discuss punch techniques and styles, tell a bit about the makers, and highlight what makes punch so approachable and appealing to today’s new artists. See what’s new in the punch needle world and learn about both the older fashioned time-honored punching methods and the contemporary approach taken by artists today.

Curator: Amy Oxford

Classes:  To accompany this Feature Exhibit, we are offering a Gallery Talk, for more information see our Workshop page.

WOMEN'S VOTE CENTENNIAL (& Invitational Exhibit)

Although we missed the actual Women’s Vote Centennial in 2020, we could not miss celebrating this momentous event. Therefore, this exhibit was rescheduled for 2021.

This Feature Exhibit celebrates the 100^th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, granting American women the constitutional right to vote. Throughout our country, suffragists protested, picketed, and were imprisoned to secure our precious right to vote.

We invite you to honor and celebrate the participation of women in our democracy, the suffrage movement, our right to vote, both then and now…. by submitting your piece in this Feature Exhibit.

This Feature Exhibit will include several components:

Classes:  To accompany this Feature Exhibit, we are offering a Gallery Talk, for more information see our Workshop page.