A detailed study of the role and legacy of weaving at the legendary Black Mountain College   In the mid-twentieth century, Black Mountain College attracted a remarkable roster of artists, architects, and musicians. Yet the weaving classes taught by Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and six other faculty members are rarely mentioned or are often treated as mere craft lessons. This was far from the case: the weaving program was the school’s most sophisticated and successful design program. About ten percent of all Black Mountain College students took at least one class in weaving, including specialists like textile designers Lore Kadden Lindenfeld and Else Regensteiner, as well as students from other disciplines, like artists Ray Johnson and Robert Rauschenberg and architects Don Page and Claude Stoller. Drawing upon a wealth of unpublished material and archival photographs, Weaving at Black Mountain College rewrites history to show how weaving played a much larger role in the legendary art and design curriculum than previously assumed.   The book illustrates dozens of objects from private and public collections, many of which have never been shown in this context. Essays explore connections and networks fostered by Black Mountain weavers; the ways in which weaving at the college was linked to larger discourses about weaving and craft; and Bauhaus influences transmitted by way of Anni Albers. The book also includes works by five contemporary artists that connect and respond to the legacy of weaving at Black Mountain College today.   Distributed for the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center   Exhibition Schedule   Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, NC (September 29, 2023–January 6, 2024)  

The first in-depth study of a monumental wall hanging—rediscovered after many years—by renowned Bauhaus artist Anni Albers. Albers was influential in elevating textiles from craft to fine art. Her exquisite wall hanging Camino Real—seen for the first time outside of Mexico City at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, and the subject of this book—is a superb example of this modern master’s work. In 1967, noted architects Ricardo Legorreta and Luis Barragán commissioned Albers to create a work for the newly built Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City. Completed in 1968, her striking wall hanging Camino Real is heavily influenced by Latin American art and culture. Showcasing Albers’s approach to working with textiles as a “many-sided practice,� it is accompanied in this book by works Albers made following her move to the United States in 1933, including innovative wall hangings, weavings, and a range of works on paper. Together, these works reflect Albers’s brilliant embrace of different materials and techniques and her ability to work at varied scales. The works in this publication offer additional context and motifs, demonstrating the artist’s pioneering investment in textiles as an art form and her parallel interest in mass-produced designs. Published on the occasion of the Anni Albers exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, this catalogue features new scholarship from the show’s curator, Brenda Danilowitz, art historian and chief curator of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and T’ai Smith, an expert on Bauhaus craft and weaving.

This career-spanning exhibition catalog reveals the enormous artistic achievements-both individual and shared-of two of the greatest pioneers of twentieth-century modernism. Featuring more than two hundred and fifty works, including paintings, photographs, drawings, textiles and furniture, this essential volume traces the creative development of Josef and Anni Albers-both instrumental figures in the development of modernism and abstract art. Illustrated profusely throughout, this book features contributions from leading experts in chapters exploring the couple's relationship and important aspects of their professional partnership, including their meeting at the Bauhaus School and their influential years at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Wide-ranging essays examine topics such as the influence of Pre-Colombian art; Josef's masterwork Homage to the Square; Anni's jewelry and works on paper; Josef's famed classes at Yale University; and Anni's years as a graphic designer after her husband's death. Both artists are celebrated for their lasting achievements in their respective fields-Josef for his color theory classes at Yale, Anni for her innovative use of unconventional materials. Readers will come away with an appreciation for the Albers' experimentation and innovation; their collaboration and teamwork; their dedication to education and mentorship; and the many ways their work challenged

They were not only two of the outstanding artists of the Bauhaus, but also a well-known couple. Their many famous works and the artists they influenced as teachers and role models bear witness to their life and work. But that is not all, as another ingenious couple literally shows us. The photographer duo Lake Verea has joined forces with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation to trace the material and intellectual traces of their artistic creativity in their estate. Correspondence with Bauhaus colleagues, tubes of paint and fabric fibers are captured with an extraordinary feel and vividness. Seeing the objects gives wings to the imagination. For inevitably, one sees the hands of the artists at work, who formed their very own contribution to 20th century art history from these objects, conversations and trains of thought.