Overview
Anni Albers
Camino Real (Detail), 1967-1969
"Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials."
Anni Albers (Berlin, Germany, 1899 - Orange, CT, 1994) was an artist, textile designer, printmaker, and educator. Albers studied painting with German Impressionist Martin Brandenburg between 1916 to 1919. In 1922, she enrolled at the Bauhaus, where the school assigned her to the Weaving Workshop, the only workshop available for women. At the Bauhaus she met her future companion, Josef Albers. After completing her course of study, Albers joined the Bauhaus faculty in 1929. In 1933, Anni and Josef Albers immigrated to North Carolina. In the United States, they founded the art department at Black Mountain College, where Anni Albers implemented a curriculum that integrated weaving and industrial design. After moving to New Haven, CT, in 1950, she focused primarily on creating mass-reproducible fabrics, writing, and working on the "pictorial weavings." From 1963 until the end of her life, she devoted an essential part of her production to printmaking, often incorporating highly experimental techniques and processes. In 1965, she published On Weaving, a seminal book for the field of design as an academic area of study and aesthetic research. She is known for bringing experimentation to the field of textile design through the incorporation of non-traditional materials. Anni Albers is one of the most influential textile artists of the twentieth century.
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