For the first time, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum will feature an exhibition on the art of hooking and sewing rugs, featuring about twenty hooked and sewn rugs. The craft of making non-woven rugs has been called "America's one indigenous folk art." It was in Maine that rug-making techniques originated and grew from their 19th-century origins to a national activity. Rug making gave housewives with no academic art training a way to create an everyday household object with decorative interest and beauty. A special component of the exhibition is a video showing the rug hooking technique.

The American hooked and sewn rugs are on loan to the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg from Joseph Caputo. The exhibit is partially funded through the generosity of Larry and Cynthia Norwood.

"Navajo Weavings: Tradition and Trade," in the McCarl Gallery features over twenty rare, colorful and pictorial Navajo weavings created by anonymous Navajo women working on hand looms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The exhibition showcases a variety of pictorial designs, materials, and symbolic imagery. The earliest object is a man's traditional wearing blanket from about 1860. Later weavings from the early 20th century began to depict the influence of the Anglo world including the incorporation of trains, American flags, and livestock.

The Navajo weavings are on loan to the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg from Rex and Pat Lucke. The exhibit is made possible through the generosity of an anonymous donor.

Can iron and art be used in the same sentence? Absolutely! This hard, often black or gray, metal was used to make everything from stoves and hinges to andirons and weathervanes. As with most folk art, though, the makers of these utilitarian pieces chose to embellish their work to make them interesting and attractive although no more functional than if they left them unadorned. A stove could still heat a room whether it was a simple iron box or iron cast into a statue of George Washington. This exhibition highlights these decorative, yet useful, objects made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Iron mining and iron production were established in the colonies almost as soon as settlers arrived. By the American Revolution, Virginia had several furnaces providing the iron that was made into firebacks, stoveplates and a myriad of household items like ladles, toasters, trivets and tammels. This exhibition is made possible through the generosity of Bonnie and Ken Shockey (Paul K. and Anna E. Shockey Family Foundation).

This exhibition will feature a colorful variety of 19th-century German wooden toys from dolls and soldiers to arks and animals. During the period, around two thirds of the toys in American shops came from Germany. Known as The Toy Workshop of the World and The Land of Toys, Germany dominated the toy market for most of the 19th-century. American toy sellers ordered their merchandise through illustrated catalogs or sent agents to Germany who personally selected the best stock with which they filled their shelves. Children played house with dolls, waged battles with soldiers, reenacted the great flood with an ark full of animals, created towns, and managed their own zoos.

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