Wall of Rugs: The Global Language of Textiles (Northwest corner, Broad and Girard)

Wall of Rugs: The Global Language of Textiles by artist Kathryn Pannepacker is located in West Philadelphia. The mural is a 7-foot-high, 297-foot-long painting of textile patterns from more than 30 countries, representing places such as Panama, Uganda, China, Chile, Nigeria, Burma, Belgium and the United States – just to name a few. The mural is divided into 33 distinct panels, each a colorful representation of what Pannepacker calls “the international language of patterns”. While some textile and pattern schemes make it apparent which country the design originates from, others are vague. For this reason, the bottom of the mural is a painting of woven string with the name of each country that a given panel represents intertwined within the design. The inspiration for this mural came while Pannepacker was attending Penn State University as an English major in the late 1980s. There she took a one-credit course in tapestry weaving, and little did she know at the time the role weaving would come to play in her life. After graduation, she headed to California in search of a graduate school where she could take up creative writing. During her search, she met a third-generation tapestry weaver and became an apprentice for three and a half years. Her love for weaving grew, and the search for a creative-writing program came to a halt.

In 1992, Pannepacker spent six months in Aubusson, France as an artist-in-residence, studying with other weavers from Mexico and Japan. While traveling in Turkey in 1998, the artist was intrigued with the colors and motifs of the rugs, tiles and architecture of the country. Pannepacker began incorporating the varying patterns of the many countries she would visit into paintings at her Spring Garden Street studio.

In 2002, Pannepacker approached Mural Arts Program director Jane Golden with the idea of doing a mural that would represent textile work from all around the world. She believes that there is an apparent vocabulary about each country’s textiles that people can identify with. Two years later, Golden finally commissioned Pannepacker to paint the mural that she so wanted to create.

The panels on the northwest corner of Broad and Girard was the first in a series of murals, with another set of panels on the southwest corner of the same intersection (2005), and additional panels installed on overpasses near the intersection of Broad Street and Lehigh Avenue in North Philadelphia (2008).

Location Note: Mural is installed on panels on the bridge on the southeast corner of the intersection of Belmont and Girard Avenues.