Resurfacing: Mennonite Floor Patterns

Since 2001 Margruite Krahn has worked to restore and present 19th and 20th-century housebarns, as well as the material culture in Neubergthal, Manitoba, Canada, a Mennonite Street Village and National Historic Site.

The study of hand-painted floors in these buildings created by earlier generations of Mennonite women, has influenced her artistic practice. Her research, documentation, and restoration of wooden floors with painted patterns inspires her to re-imagine them in floor-cloths, as well as opening her eyes to the beauty she observes in earlier Mennonite culture.

She pays tribute to her female forbearers who built, designed, and decorated the floors of their homes within an austere, male-led religious ideology, with economic restrictions.

On display from September 27, 2023 through January 27, 2024