In the past year, modern and contemporary weaving has benefited from major museum exhibitions across the United States, solo shows highlighting current weavers, such as Diné / Navajo Weaver Melissa Cody (Moma PS1, New York) and Passamaquoddy Basket Weaver Jeremy Frey (Portland Museum of Art, Maine), to explorations of textiles woven through decades or millennia, as we see in Weave abstraction in ancient and modern art (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Woven stories: modern textiles and abstraction (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC). Seeking to correct an omission of cultural memory, Cooper Hewitt (New York) presented the influential influence and fierce that the Modernist Weaver Dorothy Liebes to a new generation in a dedicated exhibition.
In a time that embraces hand transport with renewed vigor, the book Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez and their students (2023), who accompanied a recent exposure At the Institution Museum, illuminates another less known tranche in the history of textiles: history behind the weaving program of this legendary school of liberal arts.
The Black Mountain College, open from 1933 to 1957 in the mountains of the western North Carolina, remembers its experimental approach to interdisciplinary learning and community life, as well as artists, architects and famous thinkers who spent students and teachers there. Inspired by unpublished archive materials and photos, the beautiful volume of 216 pages, written by Michael Beggs and Julie J. Thomson, traces the origins and development of the school's weaving program and its impact of course.
It all started when artist educators Albres years And his spouse Josef Albers Arrived at the brand new Black Mountain College in November 1933, after the Nazis forced the closure of the Bauhaus in Berlin, where Josef taught Design lessons and Anni were the head of the weaving workshop. Josef first started teaching at Black Mountain College, and a few months later, Anni began teaching and developing the weaving program. Mixing theory and practical weaving, art and practicality, it has permeated the program with its modernist sensitivities. Finally, additional instructors also taught in the department, including Trude Guermonprez.
The weaving program has emphasized independent thought and an in -depth understanding of weaving materials and structures as a way to create inventive and determined weaving. Through archive photos and tests focused on research by co-authors and other contributors (Brenda Danilowitz, Jennifer Nieling and Erica Warren), Black Mountain College weaving illuminates teaching methods, design exercises and kinds of art, fabrics and clothes that college students have made. Three essays written by Albers add her voice to the mixture, transmitting the kind of encouragement she had to share with her students. In a test, simply entitled “Working with equipment”, published in Black Mountain College Bulletin 5 (1938), Albers discusses crafts as an antidote to modern anxiety, a way to be “close to what the world is done”, a path exhilarating towards self -sufficiency. “For creativity,” she wrote, “is the most intense excitement that we can know.”
Given the adoption by the college of fluid and interdisciplinary education, students from all over the college took weaving lessons and experienced this first -hand excitement. An index at the back of the book lists all the students who officially signed up for weaving lessons, including Ray Johnson,, Robert RauschenbergElse Regensteiner, Andy Oates, and more than a hundred others.
After leaving, the details of the book, the students and the teachers won with them the spirit of the weaving program, which echoes in future efforts. Oates, for his part, continued to launch Nantucket is loomingA successful success in hand that still operates today. GuermonPrez continued to teach, including at California College of Arts and Crafts, where she taught in Kay Sekimachi, now 98, a real one “weaver's weaver“, Whose work has been displayed in some of the textile exhibitions of this year. In a tribute from 1982 to his instructor, Sekimachi remembers that Guermonprez “Used us to learn and love materials by touching, seeing, listening and feeling them”- a concept that echoes the guiding principles of the Black College Program.
To further emphasize the continuous relevance of the college, Black Mountain College weaving ends with a section entitled “Contemporary Connections”, featuring interviews with four artists – Just BervinPorfirio Gutiérrez, Bana Haffar and Susie Taylor – whose work relates to the ideas and teachings of Guermonprez and Albers, on and out of the loom. As the book shows, even almost 70 years after triggering, the college and the weavers who have led one of its most successful programs continue to have a undulating influence on weaving and creative practices today.
Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez and their students (2023) by Michael Beggs and Julie J. Thomson is published by Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center with Yale University Press, and is available online and via independent booksellers.
