Anni Albers (1899 – 1994)

Born in Berlin, in 1922 Annelise Fleischmann became a student of weaving at the Bauhaus the renowned school of modern design in Weimar, Germany. There she met her husband, the artists and designer Josef Albers (and changed her name to Anni Albers after their marriage in 1925). At the Bauhaus, Anni Albers experimented with new materials for weaving and executed richly colored designs on paper for textiles in silk, cotton, and linen yarns in which the raw materials and structure became the source of beauty. In 1933 Anni and Josef Albers left Nazi Germany for the United States where, from 1933-1949 Anni taught weaving and textile design at Black Mountain College, North Carolina.  In 1949 she was the first textile artist to have a solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. From 1950 until her death in 1994 Anni Albers lived in Connecticut where she took up printmaking and produced a large body of graphic work from 1963 on.