Anni Albers’s introduction to weaving might have seemed inauspicious. Despite Walter Gropius publicly promoting an open admissions policy, when Albers arrived at the Bauhaus in 1922, she was shut out of the construction department: the only classes open to women were weaving workshops. After initial dissatisfaction she took to the discipline enthusiastically, beginning a lifelong artistic project of writing, weaving, drawing, design and research that took her away from Nazi-era Germany to the experimental hotbed of Black Mountain College in the thirties and then on to Yale and Connecticut in the seventies, where she stayed until her death in 1994.
Albers is having something of a revival at the moment––an excellent solo exhibition of her work at the Guggenheim Bilbao has just ended, she featured last year in a group show at MOMA and in a dual show at Yale and, finally, two books by her were published towards the end of last year: a monumental reprint of her essay On Weaving and this exquisitely produced set of around eighty sketches on graph paper, entitled Notebook 1970-80.
Read more at Elephant.