During the last two months of 2014, the galleries of the Wits Art museum were hung with remarkable tapestries after William Kentridge's designs. These weavings looked custom-made for this space. Displaying twenty weavings along with preparatory and related objects—raw materials, mock-ups, cartoons, motifs cast in bronze, etc.—curator Fiona Rankin-Smith took visitors deep inside the artist's studio Figs. 1–2). To anyone who knew Kentridge's work well, that studio was already a familiar place, because in drawings, films, flipbooks, lectures, performances, and installations, the artist has frequently portrayed himself pacing his workspace in Johannesburg.
But it is also a special property of tapestries to seem everywhere at home. Among the earliest human artifacts, weavings connect us to our nomadic past. The Bible states that Adam and Eve tied leaves together to cover themselves; early theorists of architecture, puzzling over Adam's house in paradise, speculated that human dwelling started with...