By Jennifer Quail
NEW YORK- Artists Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher have turned their creative minds to the task of rug design. The duo has been working as a collaborative art team since 1991, but this marks their first rug collection.
A+Cstudio, as the collection has been named, was designed for Nyingzemo, a company founded last year with the goal of bringing together contemporary artists and skilled rug makers from Nepal. The artists said they set out to create designs that would blend motifs from nature with a "techno sensibility," culminating in a look that would be both sophisticated and contemporary.
The result is a collection of nine pieces that speak of their background in photography, sculpture and video. Designs blend shocks of color with bold strokes and soft, natural lines, bringing both photographic and painterly techniques together in one piece.
Aziz and Cucher are each members of the faculty at Parsons The New School for Design in New York. Their work has been exhibited around the world, including at the Venice Biennale, The Hayward Gallery in London, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Berlin.
Nyingzemo was founded by Shalini Acharya and Simmy Pappachen, who met as students at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Pappachen said the two women wanted to create a company that would provide opportunities for improvement in the lives of disenfranchised women in their native countries. All rugs created with Nyingzemo' which translates to "a thing of beauty" in the Tibetan language' are RugMark-certified. The company also donates a percentage of each sale to ABC Nepal, a social service organization that rescues, shelters and helps to reintegrate victims of girl-trafficking and forced prostitution into Nepalese society.
The rugs are now available through the Nyingzemo showroom in New York.
