interaction. No pretense. W e’re all just showing up doing our

thing. I am just doing m3' thing, weaving and painting.”

Weaving and painting, Pannepacker’s disciplines, are just as

intertwined as are her murals within the communit3'. Stressing

technique, each mural has a panel that lists textile methods: tapes-

try, pile-knotting, quilting, felting and printing, among others.

A “weaving” runs across the bottom of both Wall of Rugs murals:

the white warp makes graphic stripes across the black background,

the gray yarn wending out yards at a time. The frieze unifies

the mural—the source country for each panel is written within the

weaving-and it asserts her own identity as an artist, a weaver.

Pannepacker was trained in traditional French tapestry.

W hile she took an occasional fiber arts class while she was an

undergraduate studying English with an art minor at Penn State,

it wasn’t until she arrived in Berkele3', California, in the late

1980s, a stint out west intended to spark her poetry career, that

she took up weaving in earnest. A visit to California turned into

a three-year apprenticeship under Jean Pierre Larochette, a tapes-

try weaver, and Yael Lurie, a designer. She sums up the transition

with a quote from her mentor: “Jean Pierre said to me, ‘W hy don’t

you just be a weaver and lead an interesting life and write about

it?”’ Or, as she puts it: text morphed into textile.

Larochette comes from a family with roots in Aubusson,

France, the city known for tapestries that were made for the royal

family during the 17th century. Unlike more geometric weavings

from the American Southwest or Peru, where the compositions

are guided by the axial structure of the loom, Aubusson tapestries

often begin as drawings and paintings. Pannepacker studied in

Aubusson and that time allowed her to pursue painting as part of

her practice. Tapestries take months to complete, and painting

became for her a quick way to capture fleeting ideas and images.

In 1993, Pannepacker returned to Philadelphia, where she>

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