Anni Albers

"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.

View artist website

Josef & Anni Albers

Something that Makes you Breathe with a Different Kind of Happiness

11 May - 23 Jul 2023

Zeit Contemporary Art is honored to present an online viewing room with a curated selection of prints by Josef and Anni Albers. Widely known today for their bodies of work...

Minimal Means

Concrete Inventions in the US, Brazil and Spain

24 Jan - 16 Mar 2019

Curated by Joan Robledo-Palop, Minimal Means is a conversation about space and the way people occupy and imagine that space in three parts of the world. The exhibit focuses on...

Anni Albers’s Triangulated Intaglios

Silence, Pressure, and the Elegance of Restraint

September 9, 2025

“Threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning,” Anni Albers writes in On Weaving . [1] Meaning, for her, is not added to matter; it is released when a material and a tool are set into disciplined motion. In 1976, at Kenneth Tyler’s Tyler Graphics in Bedford Village, New York, she exchanged the tug of warp for the shove of a press. Copper plates dusted with resin met dampened sheets of Arches; the press closed; paper rose around a square like a perfectly tailored cuff. The six plates that emerged—Triangulated...