Just outside Parsipur, in a tiny village near Varanasi, India, artisans are weaving electric-purple sheep’s wool into the shape of a wild-eyed dodo bird.

“It just seems like this Alice in Wonderland fantasy creature,” says designer Simon Haas of the extinct species. “The rugs are so finely made but totally wacko.”

The Haas Brothers are two of ten designers, including Katie Stout, David Wiseman, and Wendell Castle , tapped by New York gallery R & Co. and Italian carpet purveyor Amini to try their hand at a new medium (for most of them): rugs. The limited-edition pieces—created in India, Nepal, and New York—will be shipped off to Venice upon completion to be displayed as art pieces–cum-floor coverings at Palazzo Benzon in May during the Biennale and then at Design Miami/Basel in June.

“We were inspired by animal pelts, but we thought it’d be funny to use extinct animals to have pelts that you can’t actually get,” explains Haas. Other designs include a hot-pink woolly mammoth (“He looks a little squashed, like mammoth roadkill”) and a rainbow-striped zebra that calls to mind a pack of Fruit Stripe gum.

The artists, like Thaddeus Wolfe, who has developed a complicated process of mold-making to create his faceted-glass pieces, brought elements of their other work to the rug designs: “I wanted to translate the graphic surfaces of my glass into imagery,” he says of the sketches he created with markers, brushes, and ink or gouache. “Kind of like topographical abstract views.” He plans to create surface reliefs in the pile that mimic the texture of his glass vessels.

Textile artist Dana Barnes took a more hands-on approach. In her Lower East Side, New York, studio she used a metal- toothed tool to push wool through antique Persian rugs, shipped to her from Amini, outside Milan, producing painterly strokes of color. “I applied vibrant wool fibers on traditional carpets, creating movements and textures of clotted, caked surfaces,” she says. “The new dimensionality was very exciting to me, freeing the carpet from its structured form.”

A digital rendering for David Wiseman's rug.

A pencil sketch of one of Renate Müller's designs.

The Haas brothers' La Brea Brad Pitt rug in wool.

The Haas Brothers' fruit stripe rug—a nod to the gum brand's colorful zebra mascot—is produced in a limited edition of 12.

Artisans in Nepal wash Katie Stout's manic botanic rug to enrich its colors.