Our Story
Daniel Sullivan and Caramiya Davies-Reid have traveled extensively, from the remote, dangerous corners of Afghanistan, to the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Throughout their travels, the couple has had some close calls, but have also come across upon vital sources for their family-run business of importing beautiful textiles, antiquities, and hand made rugs.
The Afghan Women’s Weaving Project was born on one of these trips in the early ‘90s. Thirty years since its humble start, the project has evolved into a thriving cross-cultural exchange, bridging the vast gap between Hawaii and the mountains of Central Asia.
Our Roots
In the early ‘90s, Caramiya’s father, Terry Reid, was traveling across the refugee cities of western Pakistan when he encountered scores of Turkmen Afghans who had fled the soviet war in their home country. Although displaced and unemployed, these refugees possessed a unique and virtually unknown wealth of tribal art skills. Due to impoverished conditions and lack of organization, these skillful weavers struggled to make a living off of rugs from low-grade synthetic materials. It worried Terry that the secrets of this ancient craft appeared doomed to die with tribal elders. Sensing an opportunity both for the refugees and his own business, Terry set up shop in the corner of a dusty rickshaw parking lot and encouraged the destitute weavers to create quality tribal rugs that he could sell in America. Within a decade, his vision had evolved into profitable income that enabled him to support education for upwards of a hundred Afghans and their families in the refugee camp of Khorossan, just outside the teeming city of Peshawar.
A Partnership Was Formed
When the Turkmen Weaving Project began, it was not exactly an idle gold mine waiting to be pounced upon by the importer. It was only through intense collaboration with the refugees and oversight by Mohammed Kamil, the on-site manager and friend in Pakistan, that Caramiya’s parents built a bustling trade channel from scratch. “I walked into Kamil’s house one day,” recalls Reid, “and I looked at what they were making, and said ‘You guys aren’t going to make it.’”
Reid encouraged Kamil to start buying natural vegetable dyes and to relearn the ancient methods of hand weaving and dying. Kamil began purchasing high-mountain, hand-spun wools from Afghan Muldaris, a nomadic Pashtun tribe. The weavers rediscovered traditional dyeing agents, including pomegranate rinds, walnut husks, madder root, berries, bark and insect scales. The insistence on natural ingredients was not a mere ‘back-to-the-land hippie sentiment’. Rather, natural dyes were the common practice among Oriental rug experts and the industry standard. Nearly a century ago, in her book “Rugs in Their Native Land,” E.D. Norton made no equivocations: “Vegetable dyes are the ‘sine qua non’ in a rug,” she wrote. “All other dyes will disappear or change (over time).”
Once the weaving project outgrew the Khorossan parking lot, Reid built an open-air karkhana (factory) on the outskirts of town. “It looked like something from the American Southwest, circa 1900”, recalls Reid. High adobe walls and verandas were built to accommodate looms large enough to create rugs upwards of 375 square feet. With the infrastructure in place, Reid set out to beautify the site. He planted pomegranate and grape trees (the fruits used in dyes) and a Tandoor oven to feed dozens of workers. The kakhana is now an open and peaceful oasis in a region of overcrowded and miserable refugee cities. In nearby factories, where 11-year-old children work 14-hour days, such attention to creature comforts in unheard of. Reid’s workers often earn three times the average local wage and today, many send their children to schools built with the weaving-project funds.
Connecting Places by Creating Spaces
As their budding empire grew, Davies and Reid continued their nomadic ways, shuttling between Boise and Ketchum. One day, the couple was driving through the Camas Prairie, a quintessential western American landscape, when yet another idea struck.
As the sage greens and bleached siennas streamed by the car windows, the inspiration for a new series of rugs based on the Camas Prairie took hold; the colors of Idaho woven into Afghan tribal rugs. They sent photographs to Khorossan of autumn hikes, of the desert sun illuminating sage-covered hills and light ochre rocks. The weavers began to produce Camas rugs, and a tribal art crossed the cultural divide. In color and design, the rugs are often reminiscent of Native American weavings.
Rather than viewing the series as bridging gaps, Reid believes it is more natural to think of the Camas rugs as completing an epic circle of global interconnectedness. His theory begins with ancient Oriental rugs, some of the earliest textiles ever made (circa 500 B.C.), whose designs traveled the caravan routes from Asia into Europe and, with Islam’s Moorish influence, into Spain. When the art became further disseminated through Spanish conquests in the New World, Native American cultures reincarnated them yet again. Typical Navajo designs, then, may have their seminal routes in the high steppes of Mongolia. How else could rugs so fit for an Idaho have come so naturally from the hands of Afghan weavers? The theory is not an easy one to prove, but when sitting in Ketchum on a deep pile of Camas inspired rugs woven in Pakistan by Afghan refugees, the circular nature of civilization is hard to deny.
A Central Asian Imports Empire
In the 23 years since opening the first Davies-Reid Gallery in Boise, Idaho, the family has built a central Asian imports empire in the United States. From their base in Ketchum, their influence radiates outward--like so much good Karma--to galleries in Wyoming, Boise, Utah, and Maui.
Reflecting on his legacy, Reid noted “…to come to understanding and create a business in that part of the world, we have been incredibly fortunate. Part of that success is that it needed to happen. These people really, really needed work and help…”.
Referring to these spaces just as galleries, though, is a bit of a misnomer because one doesn’t go just to look, but rather to hold, touch, and turn exotic objects in the light. Each space is an aesthetic pleasure den, brimming with antiques, collectibles, peasant art, jewelry, scents, and mountains of handwoven rugs. It’s no stretch to say that Davies and Reid have made an amazing career out of selling whatever they could bring home from their far-flung trips. Each space retains that organic and informal vibe of an eccentric traveler’s grandiose souvenir collection. Davies-Reid is like a scrapbook, manifested in literal tons of goods.
Despite the spoils, the couple is far from jaded. “To come from Boise, I had never seen an Oriental rug as a child,” Reid said. Further, “You have to transcend tourist souvenir art -- take indigenous skills and put them into goods that Americans and Europeans will buy for their houses. It’s not this cute little tribal thing anymore; it’s the skill behind it that counts.”
