Olga Fisch, Vintage Handwoven Tapestry Wool, Metal Folk Art Rug Weaving Wall Hanging, c.1950s

Olga Fisch was born in Hungary, studied in Germany and lived in Morocco and Ethiopia before receiving asylum as a Jewish refugee in Ecuador in 1939. For her Indian-inspired designs, Mrs. Fisch uses natural black and white sheep’s wool colored with vegetable dye. To make one of her 9 by 12 rugs requires four weavers working eight hours a day for six weeks. Desiring to furnish her home with Ecuadorian-inspired rugs, she adapted designs from Indian pottery and tapas, sheets of native bark cloth. Taking the designs to Indian rugmakers, she had them woven into deep pile.
Olga Fisch was respected both for her own art and for her collection of folk art. The folk art-inspired rugs she has designed can be admired, among other places, at the Museum of Modern Art, the United Nations Building, and the Metropolitan Opera House. Trained in the traditional German academic way in Dusseldorf in the 1920s, she is a painter of the realist school. Called the mother of Ecuadorian folk art, she discovered the beauty of Ecuadorian Indian textiles in the 1940s, when others regarded them as crude and worthless.
Largely because of the efforts of Olga Fisch the artifacts produced by Ecuador’s 250 Indian tribes are now highly regarded. Over the decades she has helped thousands of Indian artists and craftsmen acquire the means of placing their wares in the world market. In so doing she introduced their beauty to a once skeptical public.
But when Mrs. Fisch first arrived in Quito as a Jewish refugee, she couldn’t have guessed what direction her life would take. An artist who had studied painting in Dusseldorf, Germany, she managed to find work as a teacher in the Quito School of Art.
Despite a nearly lifelong interest in folk art, she had no intention of starting a new collection. “I had collected folk art since I was 12 or 13, possibly as a reaction against my father’s fine china business,” she says. “My first collection came from objects that I bought in Hungarian villages. Then, after my husband and I traveled to Morocco and Algiers, I started another collection of North African folk art.” When Lincoln Kirstein, then director of the Museum of Modern Art, visited her home in 1940, he was enchanted with one of her rugs and promptly commissioned her to produce one for the museum. She has also made rugs for the UN headquarters. Fourteen of her luxurious, deep-pile wool rugs are on display at Washington’s Textile Museum. Most are 6 x 8, with colors ranging from neutral earth tones to the vivid shades of Latin America.
All her life she has been a collector of objects made by villagers, and believes that similar conditions create similar folk art the world over. As a collector and critic, she encourages the preservation of the traditional forms; as an artist, she makes free use of them.
A tribute to the breadth of her artistry is that her rugs are exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Primitive Art. She has designed rugs for the Metropolitan Opera and the UN Headquarters; last year the Renwick Gallery featured her collection of Indian ritual garb.