Women's History Month: Weaver Anni Albers
Weaver and Textile Designer from Black Mountain College, NC
Anni Albers (Faculty Weaving and Textile Design 1933-1949) (b.1899- d.1994)
Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann was born on 12 June 1899 in Berlin. While baptized and eventually confirmed in the Protestant church, she was Jewish: a fact that would prove highly significant later in her life. Her father was a successful furniture manufacturer, and her mother was a member of the Ullstein family when they owned the largest publishing company in the world, complete with its own airplanes to transport newspapers. Annelise’s mother arranged for her to learn figure drawing with a tutor and then to study art in the traditional Impressionist style popular in Germany.
Growing up, Anni was fascinated with artistic process—whether the orchestra tuning up or her parents’ home being redecorated for costume parties—and the possibilities of artistic transformation.
Anni Albers arrived at the Bauhaus in 1922, intending to study the visual arts. The conventions of the Bauhaus, which restricted their significant female student body to the weaving workshop, led her down a new path, one that would forever change the role of textiles in modern and contemporary fine art. In 1933, after the Bauhaus closed due to pressure exerted by the Nazis, Anni’s husband Josef Albers was invited to lead the art program at Black Mountain College (BMC).
The pair came to the United States by ship, landing in New York, and arriving in Black Mountain in December 1933. The weaving program at Black Mountain College was Anni Albers’s brainchild, developed with complete autonomy as an extension of and reaction to her experiences as a student and teacher at the Bauhaus. She began teaching in early 1934, just a few months after her arrival at BMC, and by 1935 weaving was established enough in the curriculum that she was appointed to the College’s faculty. At Black Mountain, Albers also developed as an artist, with her deepening interest in pre-Columbian weaving inspiring a freer, more manual approach than she
had used at the Bauhaus.
Black Mountain College
From the moment that the Alberses arrive on the campus of the experimental Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina, they felt at home. They quickly made new friends, and Josef started teaching, initially with Anni translating for him, and then, shortly thereafter, on his own. Anni began to teach weaving and created wall coverings and drapery and upholstery materials while also making individual textiles to be regarded as independent artworks with no functional purpose