Craft in America Center is pleased to present an exhibition that explores the ongoing influence of Anni Albers through the work of ten contemporary American artists and designers working with textiles. Material Meaning: A Living Legacy of Anni Albers includes work by artists Samantha Bittman, Lois Bryant, Christy Matson, Jennifer Moore, Brittany Wittman McLaughlin, Rachel Snack, Susie Taylor, Cameron Taylor-Brown, Suzanne Tick, and Marcia Weiss.
The artists’ artwork, experiments, and functional woven textiles and prototypes mirror Albers’ varied design practice. This exhibition is only a taste of Albers’ impact given the broad and deep nature of her career. It explores Albers’ continued importance as interpreted by a group of current practitioners in the fields of art, handweaving, education, and textile design. This exhibition coincides with and celebrates the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, where Albers studied and later taught. As a teacher, Albers helped establish a pedagogy that many of these artists use today. In fact, some of the artists will be giving workshops at the Center during the run of the exhibition.
Each participating artist draws upon different aspects of Albers’ artworks and designs. Samantha Bittman is fascinated by Albers’ ability to make her weavings into the pictorial subject rather than making a picture with her weavings. Recently, Bittman gained a deeper understanding of the artist with her Artist-in-Residency at the Josef and Anni Albers foundation where she was able to weave on Albers’ loom and live amongst her works. Lois Bryant explores Albers’ idea of “the shaping of the shapeless” and the limitations imposed by the materials, but not the limitations imposed by tradition. Christy Matson draws from Albers’ spirit of experimentation yet dedication to formalism in areas of design. Like Albers, Jennifer Moore travels to visit other cultures and draws inspiration from other weaving techniques, both old and new. Brittany Wittman McLaughlin learned, through Albers, that weaving is an art and a science of color interactions and textures of the various yarns and materials. Coming out of Albers’ study of touch, Rachel Snack’s textiles create a physical memory bearing witness to the hand of the artist, becoming a material portrait of the self. Susie Taylor pulls from the artist’s work to find her own rhythms and surface interest while resisting extraneous design elements based on Albers’ idea that “simplicity is not simpleness but clarified vision.” As Albers ignored the often-arbitrary boundaries between handweaving, textile design, and art making, Cameron Taylor-Brown found direction in her career based on that. Suzanne Tick states that her early weavings favored Albers’ style of working with alternative materials, exposing the warp, geometric patterning, and putting multiple threads in the weft shed. In Anni Albers On Weaving, she speaks of the ‘elemental’ nature of tactile experiences and of “material in the rough,” which influenced Marcia Weiss in her creative process: examining each of the materials for its essential properties—fiber, hand, luster, surface.
This exhibition is guest curated by Cameron Taylor-Brown.
Catalog
Material Meaning: A Living Legacy of Anni Albers by Cameron Taylor-Brown and Brittany Wittman McLaughlin.
Published October 2019 by The Weaving Workshop in collaboration with the Craft in America Center. Softcover. 84 pages.
Susie Taylor, Untitled (Black Meander), 2018.
Linen, hand woven double-weave.
Taylor is very attracted to the meandering line motifs found in many of Albers’ weavings and prints, and challenged herself to move a set of meandering lines through a specific woven construction. Rachel SnackRachel Snack, Weaving No.12, The Leyland Collection, 2016. Hand-dyed silk, cotton, wool, hand woven with supplemental weft.
Snack’s practice is grounded in the idea of growing a tangible language, by the dialect formed between maker and loom. Rachel Snack, Weaving No. 3, The Bohdi Collection, 2017. Hand-dyed cotton, wool, hand woven with supplemental weft.
Snack states, “ Like Albers’ study of touch, my textiles create a physical memory bearing witness to the hand of the artist…”Christy Matson, Paragon, 2017. Paper, linens, cotton, wool; Jacquard hand woven.
Albers’ spirit of experimentation has strongly influenced Matson’s work. Matson thinks that Albers set the precedent in this country for a simultaneously experimental and critical approach to weaving. Christy Matson, Paragon (detail)Susie Taylor, Untitled (Red Primary), 2017. Linen, hand woven twill weave with origami.
This piece explores the contrast between hand manipulated techniques and loom-controlled structures, an approach that Albers used in many of her later works. Susie Taylor, Untitled (Red Primary), (detail)Samantha Bittman, Untitled, 2018. Acrylic on handwoven textile. Bittman views Albers’ work as direct and clear, yet masterful and intuitive, something Bittman also hopes to achieve in her practice. These four works – completed during her residency at the Albers Foundation – illustrate her intent by directly depicting the woven structure and clearly illuminating it. Samantha Bittman, Untitled, 2018. Acrylic on handwoven textileSamantha Bittman, Untitled (detail)Lois Bryant, The Only Constant is Change, 2019. Cotton and metallic yarns, 7-block lampas weave
With this work, Bryant reminds us that Albers wrote about limitations as an impetus for innovation and creativity. Bryant has taken up the challenge that she posed for herself forty years ago, “Can I create compelling imagery with strictly loom-controlled techniques?”Lois Bryant, The Only Constant is Change (detail)Jennifer Moore, Parquet Permutations, 2018. Pearl cotton, double-weave pick-up.
Moore works mostly with geometric patterns and encodes musical and mathematical information within them. In this work, she is inspired by the fugues of J.S. Bach, in which he took musical motifs through many transformations and then had them come back together in resolution. Jennifer Moore, Parquet Permutations (detail)Jennifer Moore, Shadow Dancing, 1986. Pearl cotton, double-weave pick-up
Moore primarily works with double-weave, a structure in which two separate fabrics are woven together simultaneously and interchanged. Albers also explored this weave structure extensively, especially during her time at the Bauhaus. Jennifer Moore, Shadow Dancing (detail)Lois Bryant, Fog in My Head, 1981. Rayon yarns, 3 block damasse weave.
Bryant admires Albers’ attitude towards the materials and tools of weaving, what Albers called “the overlapping of artistic, scientific, and technological interests on the part of the weaver…” In this early work, Bryant creates a shimmering composition through the adroit use of weave structures woven on a multi-shaft loom, and by using rayon, a regenerated cellulose fiber developed in the late 19th century.Jennifer Moore, Backstrap loom and double-weave sampler, 2013. Cotton, double-weave pickup.
Albers dedicated her seminal text, On Weaving, “to my great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru.” After conquest by the Spanish, some ancient Peruvian weaving techniques, including double-weave, fell into disuse. Nilda Callanaupa, the founder and director of the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco, invited Moore to teach double-weave pick-up techniques to members of several Quechua weaving communities at a conference held in Cusco in 2013. This is an example of the looms used and the sampler each weaver made at the conference. Jennifer Moore, Backstrap loom and double-weave sampler, 2013Suzanne Tick, Pick Up Series: Spring Grass, 2016. Discarded mylar balloons, mixed media, handwoven.
Albers loved materiality to express itself, and Tick explores the unusual qualities of discarded materials in this serieSuzanne Tick, Pick Up Series: Spring Grass (detail)Marcia WeissMarcia Weiss, Rhythm I, 2012. Linen and rayon, ikat dyed, hand woven double-weave.
Both Rhythm I and Dialogue I simultaneously reveal and conceal the movement of color between the layers. The strategic placement of weave structure juxtaposed with color achieves this effect. Although Albers did not employ ikat technique in her double weave compositions, she plotted out her color placement with great care. Marcia Weiss, Dialogue I, 2011. Linen, ikat dyed, hand woven double-weave.
Weiss looks to Albers’ double-weave textiles for inspiration. Weiss states, “There is a perceived simplicity, which upon closer analysis, turns out to be complexity.”Brittany Wittman McLaughlin, Material Meaning The Albers Influence WOVNS Jacquard, 2019. Jacquard weaving, scanned and digitized from a hand woven swatch.
This WOVNS jacquard is paired with the hand woven fabric that inspired it. Albers embraced the capabilities of the Jacquard mechanism and spoke of the importance of developing design ideas on a handloom.Cameron Taylor-Brown, Static Animation/loops in line, 2008. Cotton, linen and wool, hand woven and stitched; mixed media elements.
Taylor-Brown explores the structure of cloth and the tactility of fibers with curiosity and respect, exploiting the artistic possibilities inherent in their interplay. Albers wrote that the interaction of structure and materials are of primary importance in woven compositions. Cameron Taylor-Brown, Static Animation/loops in line (detail)Cameron Taylor-Brown, Black Mountain Textile, 2016. Cotton, handwoven.
Black Mountain Textile was woven on a loom from Anni Albers’ workshop at Black Mountain College, and was designed to reflect the aesthetics of textiles produced at the college during Albers’ tenure as head of the weaving program. Suzanne Tick, Navigate, 2017. Wool, nylon and polyester.
Navigate, Telicity and Boucle Grid, according to Tick, represent the marriage of hand and machine processes. Tick develops many of her designs on hand looms for later manufacture by machine looms, a design process advocated by Albers. Christy Matson and Jane Palmer, Circus, 2015. Cashmere and linen, Jacquard hand woven and naturally dyed.
One in a collection of throws by Matson + Palmer, a collaboration between Matson and Los Angeles dyer Jane Palmer. The sumptuous tactility of cashmere interwoven with the stiffness of linen is a contemporary example of the “tactile sensibility” so prized by Albers. Christy Matson and Jane Palmer, Circus (detail)Rachel Snack, Untitled, hand woven textile for the body, 2019. Cotton, wool, alpaca and linen, hand woven.
Snack writes, “ Touch is so poetically a part of everyday human response, it is no surprise that textiles are valued for their tactile “touch” quality and connection to the body.” Snack’s thoughtful use of a variety of fibers illustrates concepts expressed in Tactile Sensibility, a chapter from the book On Weaving by Anni Albers. Rachel Snack, Untitled, hand woven textile for the body (detail)Brittany Wittman McLaughlin
Eucalyptus Bark, 2016.
Linen, cotton and polyester, hand wovenBrittany Wittman McLaughlin
Eucalyptus Bark (detail)Brittany Wittman McLaughlin Brittany Wittman McLaughlin, Tactile Notebook, 2016. Handmade book.
This notebook illustrates and records compositions in weaving, as exemplified by the accompanying textiles, Birch Bark and Eucalyptus Bark. These textiles are two in a series of weaving titled Tactile Sensibility, a direct reference to the chapter of the same name contained in the book On Weaving by Anni Albers. Brittany Wittman McLaughlin, Birch Bark, 2016.
Linen, cotton and polyester, hand wovenSusie Taylor, 31701 EV1, 2017. Nylon and polyester, Jacquard woven mill sample.
Taylor enjoys designing for industry. This upholstery fabric was styled from artwork she sold to Wearbest Sil-Tex Mills. Albers also considered designing for industry to be an important part of her practice. Susie Taylor, 31701 EV1 (detail)Christy Matson, Selection of woven experiments, 2012-2017Cameron Taylor-Brown, Selection of woven experiments, 1981-2015Lois Bryant, Selection of woven experiments, 1978-1986
