Designer Showcase: Authentically Marilyn

Marilyn with some of her rugs.

TEXT BY TAMARA PAVICH/PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARILYN ANNIN

More than two years ago, a hooking friend told me that an article simply must be written about a relatively unknown hooking artist. “She’s one of three Marilyns in my hooking class,” my friend wrote. “We have Good Marilyn, Bad Marilyn, and Artistic Marilyn.” Not surprisingly, this article is about the last, Marilyn Annin, whose work has delighted and intrigued me since I first discovered it.

In February of 2026, when we were finally able to meet, I sat down in Marilyn’s living room and peppered her with wrong-headed questions. Noting her unusual color combinations, I asked whether she thought about color harmony. “I don’t,” she said. “I know rug hookers use a wheel or something, but I don’t.” Marilyn doesn’t do color planning at all. She doesn’t consult the color wheel. She makes decisions about color in the moment, while she’s hooking.

I asked about a technique in Totem (one of my favorites), in which all the animal figures are hooked in the same rippling colors. “Those were just the materials I had on hand at the time,” Marilyn said. Did she always create a painting first, and then hook the rug? I wondered aloud.  “Only once,” she replied, “with Summer Sisters. That was boring.”

Once I learned to steer clear of the kinds of questions I would usually ask in an interview, Marilyn and I did hit our conversational stride. As we talked about her life, I learned how deeply Marilyn identifies as an artist—as a woman artist in particular. She has always pushed back against the status quo. And best of all, I learned about the place that inspired much of her art.

A Woman of the Lake

When Marilyn was a young woman, she and her family lived in a kind of wilderness on a lake in northern Wisconsin. Marilyn moved away to earn her degree in art. She married and enjoyed a successful career as a sculptor, painter, and even welder of metal art while also raising a family of her own. She and her husband and children moved to Iowa for a while—his career was in agricultural education, serving farmers.

Eventually, though, they landed back in her favorite place on Black Oak Lake near Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin, a small community with a grocery store, a couple of churches, and a few “roadhouses.” Importantly, the community also had a marvelous arts center—Land O’ Lake Arts, or LOLA—housed in a former grocery store with classrooms, a gallery, and even apartments for visiting artists.

In the year 2000, when Marilyn was in her sixties, 20 women signed a piece of paper that launched Marilyn’s rug-hooking group in Land O’ Lakes. Together, those women learned to hook and dye wool. “Art is isolating,” Marilyn said. “But hooking is social.”

When the group had “grown up a little” in the art of hooking, it held exhibits, sometimes in members’ homes. “I called them ‘throw-down shows,’” Marilyn said. “I moved the furniture out of the living room and placed our rugs on the floor. Over a hundred friends and neighbors from around Black Oak Lake would come to see them.”

The Pond

A great number—perhaps even a majority—of Marilyn’s rug designs are inspired by life on Black Oak Lake. “Our lake is spring fed,” Marilyn said. “The water is clear.” She designed The Pond with the idea of depicting some of the plants and creatures that make up the ecosystems of northern ponds and lakes. “I began with the dragonfly,” she said. “When the frog theme emerged, the fish became less important.” The thing I notice in The Pond is how sparingly Marilyn used her blues and greens, which we would normally associate with bodies of water, and how the plant life is rendered in neutral hues. Yet, in ways that are hard to articulate, she clearly evokes natural life in a northern pond. I am one of at least two people who envy the owner of this rug.

Marilyn rarely sells her rugs. Most of them are in the possession of her family and friends. But she regrets selling The Pond to an eager buyer. Today, her grandson works for the Department of Natural Resources, and he would love to have The Pond on his office wall.

Bear with Fraktur Birds

Marilyn couldn’t recall a particular story related to Bear with Fraktur Birds, except that it, too, was inspired by the wildlife at Black Oak Lake. I asked about the grid pattern that occurs in this rug. “I used to hook that grid when I started designing rugs,” Marilyn said. “I needed something to define the edges. I don’t do it anymore,” she said.

The Chase

The Chase is one of two rugs that Marilyn hooked almost entirely in values of red and pink. In it, neutral dogs are chasing a neutral rabbit. I ask myself how I might have hooked such a scene—probably in an excruciatingly conventional composition and color scheme. Marilyn ignores perspective as it’s taught in art curriculum, placing her figures in ways that seem both naïve and modern or sophisticated.

Turkeys

But not always. In Turkeys, the composition is realistic, showing the wild turkeys standing in a tight group, peering with curiosity at the repeating patterns of bur-oak leaves, clusters of pointy yellow leaves, and occasional flowers that surround them. Though the bodies of the birds are quite neutral with some patterning in the wings, the turkeys are outlined in an electric yellow.  The rug contains few colors, just this yellow (which also occurs in a leaf pattern), bright and dull pinks, and the muted green of the foliage. The more I study her designs, the more I feel that Marilyn’s genius lies partly in her restriction of elements, patterns, and colors used in her pieces.

Summer Sisters

Summer Sisters began as a painting, inspired by an old photo of two sisters reading near a gravestone. Marilyn left out the stone, placing her reading sisters under a tree. The painting version shows a checkered pattern behind one of the sisters, but in the hooked-rug design, both sisters appear to be resting on a purple, checkered surface, like a blanket strewn with fallen leaves. The dark, silhouetted women read quietly while the visible life force of the tree commands the viewer’s attention. Color bears little relationship to the natural world in this piece, but it serves to enliven it.

Suzy Rugs

Out of all the subject matter of Marilyn’s rugs, I was most curious about her character, Suzy, who appears twice—once posing and once striving. “Who’s Suzy?” I asked, suspecting that these two rugs must be humorous. I was wrong. Suzy was Marilyn’s greatly admired neighbor whose industry and energy were apparently epic. “I’m just amazed at older women,” Marilyn said. She recounted Suzy’s gardening, the many chores she managed by herself, and even her political activism. In her colorful dress, Suzy stands in her garden and flies with the butterflies, appearing to encourage them.

Two Apples a Day

In Marilyn’s designs, she has sometimes engaged with Greek myths and Bible stories. She has designed her own versions of Leda and the swan, Icarus, and the creation story of Adam and Eve. We talked for a while about Two Apples a Day, which depicts Eve in the Garden of Eden, eye to eye with a serpent hanging from the branches of an apple tree. Apples lie all around Eve’s body, and in her left hand, she holds the core of the apple she has eaten. In her right hand, she grasps a second apple. Here, Marilyn challenges the idea that Eve, the woman, is solely guilty of the original sin, partaking of the forbidden fruit. For Marilyn, the message is “Screw you, I’m going to eat two apples a day.”

Marilyn entered this rug in a show in northern Wisconsin, and the judge’s comments were both encouraging and dispiriting. “This is a woman artist,” he said, “a woman’s theme, and a woman’s craft.” Marilyn and I talked a little about that word, “craft.” Rug hooking is certainly a beautiful craft—though Marilyn and many other artists have elevated it to the level of art.

We decided to forgive the judge, whose final words stuck with me: “This is the only authentic piece in the show.”

Old Crow of Juneau Road

One grasps for adjectives when attempting to describe Marilyn’s art. “I hook what I experience,” she told me. Her memories of Black Oak Lake, the qualities she admires in industrious women, and even Greek myths and Bible stories—all filtered through her own artistic perspective—make every piece authentic. Authentically Marilyn.

Which leads us to our last rug. Marilyn’s family often visits Black Oak Lake, but she no longer lives there. She now lives on a tree-lined street in Madison, in a house she’s not quite used to, with her little rescue dog, Ziggy. Her granddaughters live nearby and check in with her regularly. Black Oak Lake was a shady place, she told me. She likes the light on Juneau Road.

As always, Marilyn is very much attuned to the natural life outside her home, which can sometimes be cruel. I will spare my readers the details of this story. Suffice it to say that baby rabbits were born, and the crows discovered them. Every day, another grisly scene in Marilyn’s yard. Once, the little rabbits turned against the crows and drove them away, but in the end, the crows prevailed. Hence, Old Crow of Juneau Road, Marilyn’s most recent rug.

“What’s next?” I asked her.

“Usually I have an idea,” she said, “but with my arthritis and double vision, I’m not sure what I’ll do.” She gave me a list to help rug hookers take better care of their hands. “Voltaren, copper compression gloves, and rest,” she said. She thinks hooking for five hours in a stretch might be too much for our hands.

You may be wishing for more, readers—some practical how-to advice. But after our long visit, here is what little I can tell you about Marilyn’s technique, her practice. Her pieces are large, with one dimension usually reaching 50 inches or longer. She hooks only with #6 and 8 cuts. She makes templates out of inexpensive shelf paper and arranges them into a pleasing design, which she draws on the linen. She believes that “backgrounds must be interesting, and yet they must not compete.” She has trouble finding wool that is dyed in hues that are as intense as she likes them to be.

But how does she make her art? What rules does she follow? I’m not sure we can learn these things from an interview with Marilyn. We can take away other bits of wisdom, though:

• Hook what we experience, what we love.
• Let go of rules and ask ourselves what we would hook if there were no rules.
• Voluntarily restrict color. Restrict elements. Use restriction to foster invention.
• Never underestimate the value of repeating patterns, and remember: backgrounds must be interesting.
• Break with convention and try new color combinations. Better, experiment with colors that are not literal translations of the natural world.
• Be authentically ourselves in our hooking.

As we were winding up, Marilyn’s face brightened.  “We have huge maple leaves here,” she said, showing me with her hands the size of a dinner plate. “Of all the leaf patterns I’ve hooked, I’ve never done those.”