Yale University Press Art & Architecture, Podcast
A detailed study of the role and legacy of weaving at the legendary Black Mountain College
In the mid-twentieth century, Black Mountain College attracted a
remarkable roster of artists, architects, and musicians. Yet the weaving
classes taught by Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and six other faculty
members are rarely mentioned or are often treated as mere craft
lessons. This was far from the case: the weaving program was the
school’s most sophisticated and successful design program. About ten
percent of all Black Mountain College students took at least one class
in weaving, including specialists like textile designers Lore Kadden
Lindenfeld and Else Regensteiner, as well as students from other
disciplines, like artists Ray Johnson and Robert Rauschenberg and
architects Don Page and Claude Stoller. Drawing upon a wealth of
unpublished material and archival photographs, Weaving at Black Mountain College rewrites
history to show how weaving played a much larger role in the legendary
art and design curriculum than previously assumed.
The book
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 five contemporary artists that
connect and respond to the legacy of weaving at Black Mountain College
today.
Distributed for the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
Hardcover, 216 pages, 90 color + 60 b-w illustrations, $40
On Thursday, October 13 2022 from 6:30-7:30 pm, the
second annual Ray Johnson (un)birthday celebration took place on Zoom. Co-hosted by Julie J. Thomson + Cary Loren.
This annual gathering of Ray Johnson fans and friends is held on or around Ray’s birthday to honor his life and art. (We know… he’d love to hate this!)
Special guests this year were: John Walter, director of the award winning Ray Johnson biopic How to Draw a Bunny (2002), and Ellen Levy, Ray Johnson scholar and author of A Book About Ray (MIT press, 2024) and Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts (Oxford, 2011).
Watch the recording here.
ReViewing Black Mountain College 13
Friday, October 6, 2022
UNC Asheville
This presentation shared research for our forthcoming exhibition, Weaving at Black Mountain College (Fall 2023 at BMC Museum + Arts Center), about who Harriett Engelhardt was, examine the collection of textiles that Anni Albers acquired in her memory, and share how BMC students at used this Collection in their study of weaving and textile design.
Fritz Horstman, Education Director at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and Julie Thomson will co-present a workshop about the Leaf Studies Josef Albers developed, and taught at Black Mountain College, and later at Yale University.
The Leaf Studies are one of the least examined aspects of Josef Albers’s teaching and his landmark book The Interaction of Color. First we will look deeper into the leaf studies made by Josef Albers and his students and then participants will have the opportunity to experiment with, and make their own, leaf studies. Fritz will discuss how the Leaf Studies offer a bridge between Josef Albers’s Color class + Matière studies. Leaves collected from the Blue Ridge Mountains will allow participants to further experience and study the colors available to BMC students.
A Ray Johnson discussion and (Un)Birthday celebration held as an online
Zoom Meeting to honor the artist. Cary Loren hosted the Meeting and John
Held Jr., Richard Pieper, and Weslea Sidon joined me, since each of them
interviewed Ray Johnson, and their interviews were published in
That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson, which I edited.
Recording available: thebookbeat.com/backroom/2021/10/03/ray-johnsons-unbirthday/
