As a young woman enrolling at the Bauhaus, her options were limited. Most disciplines were, in practice, closed to women. The weaving workshop seemed to be her only option.
What followed was one of the most rigorous and radical practices of the twentieth century. Albers came up alongside Klee, Kandinsky and Gropius, steeped in the Bauhaus belief that art and making were one and the same and that a handmade object could carry the weight of an idea. She took that belief and wove it, quite literally, into the structure of her work.
Her wall hangings and rug designs are not decorative objects. They are thinking made physical. The grid and geometry as a language. She called her most resolved pieces 'pictorial weavings’, works that sat deliberately between painting and textile, refusing to be easily categorised. She was interested in what thread could communicate that paint could not, the tactility and the experience of running your hand across a surface and understanding it differently.
In 1949, Albers became the first textile artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show travelled to 26 institutions across North America. It remains a landmark moment, not just for textiles, but for the broader question of what counts as art and who gets to make it.
She later transitioned into printmaking, approaching the etching press with the same methodical curiosity she had brought to the loom. Her books ‘On Designing’ and ‘On Weaving’, are not technical manuals. They are philosophy. An argument for paying attention to material and learning from what a process tells you.
There is something in Albers' approach that resonates with how we think about making. The idea that constraint can be generative. That working within a system, a grid, a structure, a loom doesn't limit expression, it sharpens it. That the most interesting thinking often happens not despite limitation, but because of it.
A thinker as much as a maker. She never separated the two.
Free Thinkers is an occasional series from the Galvin Brothers journal. People and practices that shape the way we think about designing and making.
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Images via The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London