Anni Albers
Anni Albers was a German-born American textile artist and printmaker credited with blurring the lines between traditional craft and art.
In 1971, the Albers founded the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation,a not-for-profit organization they hoped would further "the revelation and evocation of vision through art.Today, this organization not only serves as the office Estate of both Josef Albers and Anni Albers, but also supports exhibitions and publications focused on Albers works. The official Foundation building is located in Bethany, Connecticut, and "includes a central research and archival storage center to accommodate the Foundation's art collections, library and archives, and offices, as well as residence studios for visiting artists."
Albers was inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame in 1994.
Albers was a designer who worked primarily in textiles and, late in life, with printmaking. She worked with multiple techniques, primarily lithography, embossing, silk-screening, and photo-offset. She produced numerous designs in ink washes for her textiles, and occasionally experimented with jewelry design. Her woven works include many wall hangings, curtains and bedspreads, mounted "pictorial" images, and mass-produced yard material. Her weavings are often constructed of both traditional and industrial materials, not hesitating to combine jute, paper, horse hair, and cellophane.
Albers's early works, such as Drapery material (1923–6) and Design for Smyrna Rug (1925), display some of the characteristics that lasted throughout her career, notably her experimentation with colour, shape, scale and rhythm with abstract, crisscrossing geometric patterns. Her work in printmaking was also experimental as she would "print lines multiple times, first positive then negative, [and print] off-register…She would explore the limits and possibilities of her tools."To Albers, "there is no medium that cannot serve art."
