Textile TV - Anni Albers’s Warp Families

Karis Medina, Associate Curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation for a lecture exploring Anni Albers’s working process and the creation of her Pictorial Weavings. Anni Albers intended for her pictorial weavings to be viewed as visual works, worthy of contemplation, as art, but much is unknown about the process of making them as Albers left no studio journals or preparatory drawings for these works. Building a weaving takes time, and unlike painting, is a construction of parts, the first step of which is preparing a warp. Her warps, these structural grounds, are shared throughout multiple weavings. This economical practice saved Albers significant time on the loom but also required her to work within limits to create visually divergent compositions. https://albersfoundation.org/ This illustrated lecture – hosted via Zoom – will take a deep dive into the very fibers of Anni Albers’s pictorial weavings. Examining them closely--reverse engineering them--tracking down the path of Albers’s practice. It traces Albers’s weavings back to their particular warps, the warps to their groups or families, and even back onto her loom to try and understand the moments when her hands manipulated the threads.