“Creating is the most intense excitement one can come to know . . .threads…caught me…against my will…. But circumstances held me to threads and they won me over.. . . I learned to listen and to speak their language.”

- Anni Albers

“Anni shot straight about everything.. . .She looked at thread and yarn and saw possibilities that no one else did.“

- Nicholas Fox Weber

The Talk of the Town series continues at the Coffee House and welcomes back for a return engagement cultural historian and biographer, Nicholas Fox Weber, discussing his new book on the life and art of Anni Albers; textile designer, weaver, writer, graphic artist, whose transformative work with fabrics resulted in its being embraced as a pioneering art form of 20th century modernism.

Join Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch in conversation as Weber talks about his decades-long friendship with Albers and her extraordinary artistic vision; her subtle and knowing understanding of the world around her, from the rich, bourgeois Berlin of her childhood to the Mexican villages she came to know and love; from her time at the Bauhaus, first as student and then teacher, in 1930’s Weimar, Germany to her years, having fled Hitler, at Black Mountain College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. Weber explores her complex marriage to Josef Albers, painter, and color theorist, as well as her friendships with the central artists and performers of her time, among them, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, and Louise Nevelson.

Weber is the Executive Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and has been its head for the past five decades. He is the author of many books, among them on Le Corbusier, Balthus, the Clarks of Cooperstown, Mondrian, the Bauhaus, those who brought Modernism to America and the iPhone, ibauhaus. Weber lives in Connecticut, Paris, and Ireland.

“An intimate, insider’s account of a pioneering artist whose biography is long, long overdue.”

- Matilda McQuaid, author of Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance

The successful Talk of the Town series of conversations is now in its happy third year.