"Dotted" Weaving

“I think [weaving] is closest to architecture, because it is a building up out of a single element—building a whole out of single elements.”  -Anni Albers

The godmother of the American fiber movement, Albers is known for expressive weavings with innovative structures and pictorial elements. In 1949, she had her first solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; a decade later, she produced this work, with its distinctive weft knots appearing as “dots.”

Albers trained at the Bauhaus, the radical German art school that strove to unite art, design, and crafts to create a new material world appropriate for modern living. Like most female Bauhaus students, Albers was channeled into the weaving department—of which, in 1931, she took direction. In 1933, she (with her husband, Josef) emigrated to the United States to teach at the Black Mountain school, a highly influential and innovative art school in North Carolina, where she began to create experimental and expressive weavings, sometimes inspired by her studies of South American textiles, and embracing innovative structures and pictorial elements.