Common Places features three objects from the museum's permanent collection which transform printed works on paper into one-of-a-kind embroideries: a seventeenth-century valance, a cigarette silks quilt, and Alighiero Boetti’s Mappa.

Mappa (1979), is a work conceptualized by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti and embroidered by Afghan women, which takes the geopolitical map as its subject. Beginning in 1971, Boetti’s embroidered world maps were produced serially in Kabul until the Soviet invasion in 1979; thereafter, production shifted to Afghan refugee camps in Peshawar, Pakistan.

The textiles presented in the exhibition, including Boetti's work, articulate contemporary aspects of global phenomena and suggest that far from being a recent development, globalization has deep historical roots that extended into the home and everyday life.