New Flooring Collection Welcomes Visitors to Revamped Exhibition

The Museum of New Mexico Foundation’s licensing program has the entrance to the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture’s redesigned Here, Now and Always exhibition covered—literally.

Thanks to a creative licensing partnership with Durkan, a hospitality division of Mohawk Industries Inc. that focuses on flooring solutions for public buildings, the revamped permanent exhibition will feature 1,000 square yards of donated carpet tiles inspired by Ancestral Puebloan pottery in the museum’s collections.

The carpeting is part of Celebrated Heritage, a new collection featuring five individual flooring designs inspired by pottery and basketry from the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and Mexican textiles from the Museum of International Folk Art.

The project is the licensing program’s third successful collaboration with Durkan. For this collection, says Pamela Kelly, the Foundation’s vice president of licensing and brand management, Durkan designers focused on museum materials rich in texture and evidencing signs of use or repair.

Kelly likens the collaborative process of adapting source material from the collections to “composing a symphony or writing a story.” The goal is “to transform the essential elements of the cultural material into a modern form.”

Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Interim Executive Director Matthew Martinez expresses gratitude to Mohawk for the carpet donation. “The selected carpet tiles are but one piece of a larger museum story,” he says. “The interpretation of objects is continuous and embedded throughout Here, Now and Always. It is our goal to facilitate such conversations within exhibits and educational programming.”

Image: Top: Carpet by Durkan, Innate Spirit (928 Stoneware). Photo courtesy Durkan. Bottom: Ceramic jar, ancestral pueblo, 900 A.D. Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology collection. Photo by Saro Calewarts

This story is from the Foundation's 2021 Annual Report.