American Hooked and Sewn Rugs

In 1974 Joel and Kate Kopp were guest curators for the ground-breaking and very popular exhibition of hooked rugs held at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York. In that exhibition and in this book, first published in 1975, then expanded and reissued in 1985, the Kopps brought a new eye to the field and showed how the primitive imagery that appears in these rugs often parallels other categories of folk art. With over 230 illustrations, nearly half of them in color, the authors trace the development of the hooked rug, from its origins in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century yarn-sewn bed rugs to twentieth-century examples of hooked rugs.