Anni Albers

Personal

Vocation

German textile artist and printmaker, who is, after the British weaver Sir Peter Collingwood, perhaps the best known textile artist of the 20th century. In 1925, she married Josef Albers, who had rapidly become a "Junior Master" at the Bauhaus. In 1931, Anni Albers became Head of the Weaving Workshop, making her one of the few women to hold such a senior role at the school. The Bauhaus at Dessau was closed in 1932 under pressure from the Nazi party and moved briefly to Berlin, permanently closing a year later in August 1933. Anni and Joseph Albers were invited by Philip Johnson to teach at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, arriving stateside in November 1933. Both taught at Black Mountain until 1949. In 1949, Anni Albers became the first designer to have a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Albers's design exhibition at MoMA began in the fall and then toured the US from 1951 until 1953, establishing her as one of the most important designers of the day. Following the MoMA exhibition, Albers spent the 1950s working on mass-producible fabric patterns, creating the majority of her "pictorial" weavings, and publishing a half-dozen articles and a collection of her writings, On Designing. Her second book, On Weaving, was published in 1965. Anni Albers died on 9 May 1994, aged 94, in Orange, Connecticut. Link to Wikipedia biography