Click HERE to purchase a 'Black Mountain College All Inclusive' Ticket to attend all 5 BMC presentations and 1 workshop including box lunch for $75 (a $116 value).

In 1946 the textile industry in the United States was on an upward trajectory fueled by a combination of new technologies and post-World War II consumerism and promoted by museum curators, critics, and publishers. Anni Albers became a beneficiary of this intersection of commerce and art when, in 1949, New York’s Museum of Modern Art presented a landmark exhibition of her recent work, organized by the museum’s director of industrial design, Edgar Kaufmann jr., and installed by its architecture and design curator, architect Philip Johnson.

From 1950 to 1952, MoMA’s “Anni Albers Textiles” crisscrossed the country and was shown in twenty-six museums in fifteen states and Canada. A decade later a second traveling exhibition “Anni Albers, Pictorial Weavings” organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, presented a new body of her work placing Albers firmly in the public mind as an independently innovative designer. Her design work, supported and elucidated by her writings collected in the anthology, On Designing (Pellango Press 1959), created a synergy that left the attentive viewer and reader in no doubt as to the power of both her aesthetic vision and her intellectual convictions. An extended essay, “The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture,” in Perspecta (1957)the journal of the Yale School of Architecture, confirmed Albers’s authority among the first tier of writers on modern textiles and their role in contemporary architecture.

In 1948, as Anni Albers was weaving a new group of works for her MoMA exhibition, a young self-taught hobbyist, Gloria Finn, was learning to make hooked rugs in her home in Washington DC. Their paths would cross in 1954 by which time Finn had developed her hobby into a growing collaborative enterprise with contemporary artists, Albers among them. Presenter Brenda Danilowitz will examine the history, impact, and outcome of their collaboration.