Wednesday, April 1, 7:30 p.m.

Anni Albers + Ruth Asawa: Two Lives in Art - Brenda Danilowitz, chief curator of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation will speak about Anni Albers and Ruth Asawa, two artists with extraordinary lives as innovative artists and dedicated educators.
Co-sponsored by Cloth Fiber Workshop

BMCM+MAC, 56 Broadway – Downtown Asheville
$7 / $5 BMCM+AC members + students w/ID

In conjunction with its yearlong celebration of the women of Black Mountain College, on Wednesday, April 1 at 7:30 pm, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and Cloth Fiber Workshop will present a lecture/presentation by Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The presentation, Anni Albers + Ruth Asawa: Two Lives in Art will concentrate on two of BMC’s most gifted and prolific artists who were also dedicated educators. Albers and Asawa are two of the three artists in BMCM+AC’s current exhibition (the third is M.C. Richards).

BMC faculty member, Anni Albers is known for her unique modernist graphic and textile designs, as well as her articulate aesthetic philosophy. Anni and her husband Josef Albers came by boat to BMC in the fall of 1933, shortly after the college opened. They came from the Bauhaus School of Design in Germany which was closed in 1933 with Hitler’s rise to power. The Alberses remained at BMC until 1949 and had a lasting influence on the college’s art and design curriculum. Anni founded BMC’s weaving workshop, and her teaching approach relied heavily on hands-on experimentation with materials and a focus on the industrial aspects of textile production. After BMC, Anni continued her work in textiles and received many commissions, becoming the most renowned textile artist of the 20th century. She was the first textile artist to be given a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1949. She also made a number of prints that demonstrate her impressive design sense in a two dimensional format. A portfolio of these prints is included in this exhibition.

At the age of 16, Ruth Asawa and her family were interned in a Japanese-American camp on the West Coast. After her release, she attended Milwaukee State Teachers College. At he suggestion of fellow students there, Ruth then came to BMC in the summer of 1946 and stayed until 1949. Over these three years her teachers included Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Max Dehn, Buckminster Fuller and Merce Cunningham. In the summer of 1947 Ruth studied basket weaving in Mexico, which influenced her inventive experimentation with wire sculpture. A successful artist, she received many public art commissions in San Francisco, where she settled with her husband Albert Lanier, also a former BMC student, including San Francisco Fountain at the Grand Hyatt on Union Square, the Mermaid Sculpture at Ghirardelli Square and the Japanese-American Internment Memorial Sculpture at the Federal Building Plaza in San Jose, California. Ruth also became an avid supporter of arts education in San Francisco.

Brenda Danilowitz is the Chief Curator of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut and has written extensively on Anni Albers for numerous books and periodicals.

For additional information or questions call Alice Sebrell at 828-350-8484