Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

September 29, 2023 – January 6, 2024

View the Digital Exhibition Page

Will Hamlin, Mimi French in the BMC Weaving Workshop, ca. 1939-1940. Collection of BMCM+AC.

Weaving at Black Mountain College: Upcoming Fall 2023 Exhibition, Book, and Conference

Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students is the first exhibition devoted to textile practices at Black Mountain College (BMC). Celebrating 90 years since the college’s founding, the exhibition reveals how weaving was a more significant part of the College’s legendary art and design curriculum than previously assumed.

The  weaving program was started in 1934 by Anni Albers and lasted until Black Mountain College closed in 1956. Despite Albers’s elevated reputation, the persistent treatment of textile practices as women’s work or handicraft has often led to the discipline being ignored or underrepresented in previous scholarship and exhibitions about the College; this exhibition brings that work into the spotlight at last.

In addition to Albers, Trude Guermonprez taught her first classes in the United States at Black Mountain College, and other notable weaving faculty like Marli Ehrman and Tony Landreau brought their own perspectives on the discipline. Among their students, some went on to find work as weavers, teachers, and textile designers, including Else Regensteiner, Lore Kadden Lindenfeld, Marilyn Bauer, Don Wight, and Joan Potter Loveless. Other students did not pursue future work in weaving but became successful artists and designers in their own right, including Ray Johnson, Don Page, Claude Stoller, Jane Slater Marquis, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Through informal interactions, lectures, and exhibitions, weaving practices, and ideas spread beyond the weaving program into other areas of the College, a transfer of knowledge co-curators Michael Beggs and Julie J. Thomson have termed “weaving literacy.” Repositioning the textile work of students and faculty in conversation with the rest of the BMC curriculum offers a new, rich, and detailed understanding of the weaving program’s relationship to other disciplines. A particularly notable example of the ways in which this knowledge transfer functioned was the Harriett Engelhardt Memorial Collection, a collection of about 100 vernacular and ancient textiles curated by Anni Albers, which was used to teach students in the weaving program and was the subject of public exhibitions at the College.

The exhibition features objects from the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center’s permanent collection and loans from institutional and private collections. Many of the objects to be shown have either never been publicly exhibited, or never been shown in the context of BMC. 

The exhibition also features work by selected contemporary artists whose work connects to the legacy of Black Mountain College’s weavers: Kay Sekimachi, Jen Bervin, Porfirio Gutiérrez, Susie Taylor, and Bana Haffar.

Curated by Michael Beggs and Julie J. Thomson.

BOOK
Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students
By Michael Beggs and Julie J. Thomson
Additional contributors: Brenda Danilowitz, Jennifer Nieling, and Erica Warren

Published by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
Distributed by Yale University Press
216 Pages, 8.5 x 10.5 in, 91 color + 60 b-w illustrations
October 2023, Hardcover, 9780300273564
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300273564/weaving-at-black-mountain-college/

Drawing upon a wealth of unpublished material and archival photographs, this book rewrites history to show how weaving played a much larger role in the legendary art and design curriculum than previously assumed. It illustrates dozens of objects from private and public collections, many of which have never been shown in this context. Essays explore connections and networks fostered by Black Mountain weavers; the ways in which weaving at the college was linked to larger discourses about weaving and craft; and Bauhaus influences transmitted by way of Anni Albers. The book also includes works by contemporary artists—Kay Sekimachi, Jen Bervin, Porfirio Gutiérrez, Susie Taylor, and Bana Haffar—who connect to the legacy of weaving at BMC.

CONFERENCE
ReViewing Black Mountain College 14 Conference
Thematic Focus: Material + Structure
October 13–15, 2023, Asheville, North Carolina
Hosted by Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and The University of North Carolina, Asheville

ReVIEWING Black Mountain College is an annual conference exploring the history and legacy of Black Mountain College. This three-day program, open to the public, features performances, lectures, and discussions by a diverse group of local, regional, and international artists, experts and scholars. This year’s conference, with the thematic focus of Material + Structure, coincides with the opening of the museum’s exhibition Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students, and celebrates the 90th anniversary of the founding of Black Mountain College.

Conference Keynote Speakers: Brenda Danilowitz + Erica Warren in conversation 

Brenda Danilowitz is an art historian and chief curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. She is the author and editor of numerous books and essays on the work of Josef and Anni Albers and has organized exhibitions of their work around the world.

Erica Warren is a decorative arts and design curator and scholar, and is currently the editor of Craft Quarterly the James Renwick Alliance for Craft’s magazine.

Featured Speakers: Michael Beggs and Julie J. Thomson, curators of Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students.

ABOUT THE CURATORS
Michael Beggs is a designer and independent scholar who has been studying Black Mountain College since 2010. He previously worked at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and has written about the Alberses and Black Mountain College in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–57 (Yale University Press, 2015), Josef Albers: Interaction (Yale University Press, 2018), and The Quiet House: Stillness in Lake Eden (Atelier Editions and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2022).

Julie J. Thomson is an educator, independent scholar, and curator who has been researching and writing about artists at Black Mountain College since 2006 and served as co-editor of the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies from 2018–20. She is the author of Begin to See: The Photographers of Black Mountain College (Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2017) and the editor of  That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson (Soberscove Press, 2018).