Resurfacing: Mennonite Floor Patterns | Exhibit opening

Artist Margruite Krahn restores and re-imagines hand painted Mennonite house barn floor patterns from the turn of the 20th century. She brings to light these sometimes overlooked examples of women's self expression from within the economic and gender constraints of their time.

Margruite is observant of the people and life around her, noticing people's affinity with the land, each other, and their history. Her work engages with the contrast of home as sanctuary and as a place that holds conflict, alongside changing traditions and practices of beauty.

Margruite lives and creates art in Neubergthal, an early Mennonite street village and national historic site in south-central Manitoba, Canada. The village sits on Treaty One Land, land that the Métis Nation applied for and was denied at the same time the Mennonites were granted this same land. Since moving to Neubergthal in 1998, Margruite has been actively involved in restoring its built heritage, honoring the past and creating space in the present for artists and musicians in their barn and historic Herdsman House. She has also been rekindling relationships with women of the Roseau River Anishnaabe First Nation whose foremothers sold and bartered handmade rugs and baskets with Mennonite settler women.