German-born artist Anni Albers was one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American art. Following the closure of the Bauhaus, a radical school for artists, designers, and architects, in 1933, she emigrated to the United States with her husband, Josef, and joined the faculty of Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Albers established the college’s weaving program, where her teaching pushed textiles as a rigorous artistic discipline, one grounded in material investigation and abstraction. Rather than simply reproducing traditional patterns in their work, students learned through direct experimentation with materials, an approach that became central to postwar American art education. “I find this great problem that people are so inclined to think of textiles always in this useful sense. They want to sit on it; they want to wear it,” Albers said in 1968. “And they don’t like to think of it as something that might hang on the wall and have the qualities that a painting or a sculpture has.”

–Nora Severson Cafritz