Albers, Anni

Anni Albers (1899-1994) was a textile designer, weaver, writer, and printmaker who worked in Connecticut and at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Anni Albers was born in Germany in 1899 and attended the Bauhaus where she met her husband designer Josef Albers in 1922; they married in 1925. At the Bauhaus. she experimented with new materials for weaving and executed richly colored designs on paper for wall hangings and textiles in silk, cotton, and linen yarns.

When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, the Albers lived alongside the families of artist teachers Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Oscar Schlemmer, and others in one of the masters' houses designed by Gropius. In 1933, the Albers emigrated to the U.S. to work at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Both taught at Black Mountain until 1949. During these years Anni Albers' weavings were shown throughout the US and she published many articles on textiles and design, culminating in a 1949 show at the Museum of Modern Art, the first of its kind for a textile artist.

In 1950, Josef accepted the position of chair of the design department at Yale and the Albers moved to Connecticut. During the 1950s and 1960s, Anni worked productively from a home studio, producing fabric patterns, creating "pictorial" weavings, and writing articles and books about weaving, including On Designing in 1952 and On Weaving in 1965. During the 1960s she also started printmaking and devoted much of her later career to this artform.

Anni Albers died in Connecticut in 1994.

From the guide to the Annie Alber papers, (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)