1949 New York
Anni Albers: Textiles was the first solo exhibition of a textile artist at the Museum of Modern Art. Organized by the architect Philip Johnson, who was head of the architecture department at the museum, the show featured Anni Albers's pictorial weavings, draperies, upholstery, and dress materials, together with her educational experiments using paper, corn, grass, and string. The show emphasized the artistry of her work and experimental use of materials, as well as her analytical approach to form and function and its importance to modern design.
From the press release: "Her intimate contact with the craft of weaving has enabled her to vary and to extend the usefulness of textiles far beyond the traditional. Apart from curtain fabrics, rugs, and upholstery materials, she has experimented with almost everything from woven paintings to stiff woven screens designed as architectural elements for modern buildings. Her background has given her a clear understanding of the principles of modern architecture and has thus enabled her to produce textiles that are an integrated part of modern living space."
The exhibition traveled to Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey, 19 January–9 February 1950; Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, 23 February–13 March 1950; The Settlement School, Getlinburg, Tennessee, 9–30 June 1950; Germanic Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 3–31 October 1950; Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 14 November–5 December 1950; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, 19 December 1950–9 January 1951; State Teachers College, Paterson, New Jersey, 23 January–13 February 1951; Newcomb Art School, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, 27 February–20 March 1951; M.I.T., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 3–24 April 1951; William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, 5–29 May 1951; Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, 15 June–5 July 1951; Louisville Free Public Library, Louisville, Kentucky, 4–25 September; Western State College, Gunnison, Colorado, 28 October–18 November 1951; Eastern Illinois State College, Charleston, Illinois, 2–23 December 1951; University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, 8–29 January 1952; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, 15 February–7 March 1952; David Strawn Art Gallery, Jacksonville, Illinois, 19 March–9 April 1952; University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, 23 April–14 May 1952; Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, 2–23 June 1952; Brooks Memorial Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee, 1–22 October 1952; Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, 6–27 November 1952; Louisiana Polytechnic Institute, Ruston, Louisiana, 11 December 1952–2 January 1953; Pennsylvania State College, State College, Pennsylvania, 14 January–4 February 1953; Berea College, Berea Kentucky, 18 February–11 March 1953; Illinois State Normal University, Normal, Illinois, 25 March–15 April 1953; Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 29 April–19 May 1953
1959 Cambridge, Massachusetts
Anni Albers: Pictorial Weavings featured twenty-nine of Albers's pictorial weavings, the majority of which were created in the 1950s. The traveling exhibition represented the first comprehensive display of these works to date.
"Though some of the earliest weavings unearthed after thousands of years have the magic of things not yet found useful and later periods have shown us weaving as art, thousands of years of establishing and expanding the usefulness of woven materials have made us see in them first something to be worn, walked on, sat upon, to be cut up, sewn together again, in short, largely something no longer in itself fulfilled.
To let threads be articulate again and find a form for themselves to no other end than their own orchestration, not to be sat on, walked on, only to be looked at, is the raison d'étre of my pictorial weavings."
—Anni Albers, from the catalogue for the exhibition
1999 Venice
Anni Albers was the first major retrospective of Anni Albers's work, organized on the hundredth anniversary of her birth. The exhibition featured a wide selection of Albers's weavings, drapery materials, and wall coverings, as well as the preparatory studies and graphic works that accompanied them. Of the approximately seventy individual weavings that she produced, about thirty-five of these were on display, including the five extant Bauhaus period wall hangings which were exhibited together for the first time. Her most important commission, Six Prayers, 1966–67 (Jewish Museum, New York) was a focal point. In addition, the exhibition reproduced some of the jewelry that Anni Albers made at Black Mountain College in the 1940s, when she used safety pins, paper clips, upholstery springs, sink strainers, angle braces, and other ordinary objects from hardware stores in transformative arrangements as pendants or necklaces.
The exhibition catalogue, titled Anni Albers, (Guggenheim Publications, New York, 184 pp.) includes a personal memoir of the artist by Nicholas Fox Weber; essays by Virginia Gardner Troy, Kelley Feeney and Jean-Paul Leclercq; a selection of writings by the artist, and an extensive biography by Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi. The catalogue is the most comprehensive publication on the artist currently in print.
2015 Milan
A Beautiful Confluence: Anni and Josef Albers and the Latin American World presents the art of the 20th-century masters in tandem with the pre-Columbian objects they collected from the time they moved to America in 1933 until Josef's death in 1976. In fourteen trips to Mexico and other countries in Central and South America, they discovered that "Art is everywhere." The Alberses felt an emotional camaraderie with stonecutters and potters and weavers, some of whom lived centuries ago, because of a shared interest in line and color and artistic technique. With little money, the couple amassed an important collection, and the exchange between what they bought and their own work became powerful. This exhibition, featuring more than 200 objects, reveals the similar visual and artistic interests and personal passions of Anni and Josef and the Latin American world that became their haven. For more information, visit abeautifulconfluence.com
Selected Reviews
"Bauhaus below the Border" by Charles Darwent, The World of Interiors, December 2015
"Josef and Anni Albers' Latin American Road Trip" by Liam Freeman, AnOther, November 3, 2015
2016 Wellesley, Massachusetts
Anni Albers: Connections considers Anni Albers's printmaking over the course of six decades. In 1984, Albers published Connections—a set of nine silkscreens that evoke pivotal moments in her prolific career. Reflecting on her life as a designer, she chose motifs for the prints based on her work from particular years: two from the 1920s, when Albers was at the Bauhaus and met her lifelong partner and later husband Josef; two from the 1940s, when the couple taught at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina after having fled Nazi Germany; three from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, after they resettled in Orange, Connecticut, and Josef served as Yale University's Chair of the Department of Design; and two from the early 1980s, after Josef's death. The exhibition pairs the Davis Museum's exquisite example of this silkscreen portfolio with Albers's work from each era, tracing the development of her patterns from sketches on graph paper to gouache maquettes. Preparatory works on paper are paired with fabric swatches and remnants manufactured by commercial textile producers.
Untitled, 1941
rayon, linen, cotton, wool, jute
21 × 46 in. (53.3 × 116.8 cm)
2012.12.1
2017 Bilbao, Spain
Anni Albers: Touching Vision presents a focused survey of the artist's key series over six decades of work, from her Bauhaus years to the late 1970s. Best known for her pioneering role in the field of textile or fiber art, her innovative treatment of warp and weft, and her constant quest for new patterns and uses of fabric, Albers was instrumental in redefining the artist as a designer. Her art was inspired by pre-Columbian folklore and modern industry, yet unhampered by conventional notions of craftsmanship and gender-specific labor. Albers studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where she met her husband, the painter Josef Albers, and eventually directed the weaving workshop in 1931. After the institution was closed by the Nazi party in 1933, Albers and her husband moved to North Carolina, where they were both hired to teach at a free-form school that would become a benchmark of modern American art, Black Mountain College. There Albers continued to combine her educational activity with artistic experimentation, while also authoring what are now considered seminal texts in the history of contemporary textile art. The exhibition reveals affinities and unifying threads that illustrate the influence and continued relevance of this unique artist's ideas. A selection of writings by the artist, translated for the first time into Spanish, is being published as a companion to the exhibition.
2017 Le Locle, Switzerland
Anni Albers: L'Oeuvre Gravé presents a survey of prints by the artist. Albers turned her hand to printmaking in the 1960s and worked primarily in this medium until her death in 1994. Collaborating with some of the leading printers of the era she experimented with lithography, screen printing, embossing, woodcut, and various intaglio techniques. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Alan Cristea Gallery, London.
2017 Milan
Anni Albers: The Prints focuses on works on paper by the artist, including lithographs, engravings, and silkscreen and other prints on paper from 1969 to 1978, as well as archival photographs of the artist. In the 1960s, Albers developed graphic techniques in printmaking—taking advantage of the processes of the medium and the mediation of machines—that were impossible in weaving. These prints were a celebration of the possibilities of her new realm. In her pivotal 1965 book "On Weaving" Albers wrote: "The more we avoid standing in the way of the material and in the way of tools and machines, the better chance we have that our work will not be dated, will not bear the stamp of too limited a period of time and be old fashioned some day . . . and it will outlast fashion only if it embodies lasting, together with transitory, qualities."
Study for a Variant, ca. 1947
oil and pencil on blotting paper
1976.2.270
2017 New Haven, Connecticut
Small-Great Objects: Anni and Josef Albers in the Americas examines intersections between the art-making and art-collecting strategies of the Alberses, two of the most influential figures of twentieth-century modernism. Between 1935 and 1967, the couple made numerous trips to Latin America and the American Southwest and amassed a large collection of ancient artworks from these regions. The exhibition looks at these objects in depth and considers how Anni and Josef's collection supported their aesthetic sensibilities and teaching practice. In addition to objects from the ancient Americas, the show gathers together dozens of works that the couple made, including textiles, paintings, works on paper, and rarely studied photographs that Josef took at archaeological sites and museums. Demonstrating the Alberses' deep and sustained engagement with ancient American art, an interest that was decades ahead of its time, Small-Great Objects explores a fascinating dimension of the couple's creative vision.
2017 Windsor, Connecticut
Harmony, curated by students at the Loomis Chaffee school, features screen prints, watercolor paintings, and lithographs by Josef and Anni Albers. In a statement, the students write: "In a world full of chaos and disorder, it can be hard at times to find a thread that is uniting. Differences in our preconceived ideas and critical views on society have formed many divisions, gaps that we often try to forcefully bridge with violence and hatred. However, by looking at things from multiple, different perspectives, we truly appreciate not only the amazing diversity we possess but also the many similarities that join us together. In our Harmony exhibit, we have tried to show how our perceptions, particularly of color, differ from person to person and can often times distort the truth. Each piece in the show also has a number of "supporting pieces" that link the Albers's art to other cultures or every day objects. These supporting pieces show how design elements can be universal, unlimited by culture or time. We hope that by reflecting upon the limitations and possibilities of your own point of view, you can take the time to admire our differences, find common ground, and strive to make a difference in society where, one day, we can all live in harmony.
