Of the pieces on display in our current exhibition, Black Mountain College: Shaping Craft + Design, we have a special addition to our collection – a Shuttle-Craft Practical Loom that was used in the BMC Weaving Workshop. During the exhibition’s opening on Sept. 6th, we were honored to have the loom demonstrated by Mikkel Hansen, a retired architect and local artisan, who also beautifully restored the historic loom earlier this year.
Shuttle-Craft Practical Loom from BMC Weaving Workshop.
The Shuttle-Craft Practical Loom represents the distinctive innovation and creativity in textile design that came from the weaving workshop at BMC. With Anni Albers as the weaving and textile instructor, the workshop was designed to emphasize student exploration of techniques, whereas most weaving workshops in the United States at the time had students simply copy patterns that were considered traditional. Anni Albers believed that a textile’s creation, as Mary Emma Harris notes in The Arts at Black Mountain College, was “a process involving a response to the capacities and limitations of materials, a knowledge of the characteristics of weaves, and an acknowledgment of the specific functional requirements for the textile in mind.” Students at BMC gained that deeper understanding of weaving through the creative freedom that Anni Albers allowed them. Such freedom and knowledge produced several textile pieces that are exhibited in Black Mountain College: Shaping Craft + Design, by students of Anni Albers, including Fred Goldsmith, Erris Burnett, Ragland Watkins, Elizabeth Schmitt Jennerjahn, Don Page and Lore Kadden Lindenfeld.
If you haven’t yet seen the exhibit, it will be on display until January 4, 2014 here at BMCM+AC. We encourage you to attend our annual conference that is in conjunction with Shaping Craft + Design. The conference, ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 5, will be held Oct. 11-13, 2013 at the Reuter Center on the UNC-Asheville campus. If you are interested in learning more about Anni Albers in particular, join us for the presentations by speakers Jess Jones and Tai Smith, which you can find on the conference schedule here.
