Thursday, February 29, 2024

Podcast: Episode 131-The History of Weaving at Black Mountain College

 Yale University Press Art & Architecture, Podcast


The artists, educators, independent scholars, and experts on the history of Black Mountain College Michael Beggs and Julie J. Thomson joined forces and produced the exhibition (at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center) and book Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students. In this episode of our podcast, we talk to Michael and Julie about this impressive project.

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

by Michael Beggs and Julie J. Thomson
Contributions by: Brenda Danilowitz, Erica Warren and Jennifer Nieling

 

 

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 Drawing upon a wealth of unpublished material and archival photographs, Weaving at Black Mountain College rewrites history to show how weaving played a much larger role in the legendary art and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

Yale University Press page
Also available for purchase from the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

 

Monday, February 6, 2023

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


Weaving at Black Mountain College:

Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, NC
September 29, 2023 – January 6, 2024 
 
Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students will be the first exhibition devoted to textile practices at Black Mountain College (BMC). Celebrating 90 years since the college’s founding, the exhibition will reveal how weaving was a more significant part of BMC’s legendary art and design curriculum than previously assumed.

BMC’s weaving program was started in 1934 by Anni Albers and lasted until the 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 U.S. at BMC, and Marli Ehrman and Tony Landreau brought their own perspectives on the discipline through their work and teaching. 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.
 

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

Zoom Meeting: Second Annual Ray Johnson (Un)Birthday Celebration

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.

Thursday, October 6, 2022

Talk: How the Harriett Engelhardt Collection Came to Be at BMC

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.

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

Leaf Studies Workshop

Saturday, November 13, 2021
ReViewing Black Mountain College 1
2

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.

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Zoom Meeting: Ray Johnson (Un)Birthday Celebration

Hosted by Cary Loren and The Book Beat, 26010 Greenfield Oak Park, Michigan
Thursday, October 14, 2021 

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/