Interviewed by Tony George (’24)
Weaving at Black Mountain College (Black Mountain College Books, 2023) is a collection of essays detailing the history of the weaving curriculum at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the mid-twentieth century. The volume was published in October 2023 through Yale University Press, and edited by Michael Beggs and Julie J. Thomson. Erica Warren’s essay, Following the Thread: Black Mountain College and Weaving Education in the United States, 1934-1956, explores the influence of artists Else Regensteiner and Lili Blumenau in connection with Black Mountain College.
Tony George: The thought process we had at Common Forms with doing these interviews is to not only learn about the types of research that MAPH instructors are doing, but also to get a sense of what the process of research and writing for publication is like. So, the questions I’ve prepared deal with both of those topics. So first of all, maybe some general background on your academic discipline and where you’re coming from within art history?
Erica Warren: Sure, that makes sense. So, I guess I’m a bit of an outlier in terms of what we might think of a lot of art historians studying. My interests are in textiles, decorative arts, and design. And that’s not to say that there’s not a lot of people working in those fields, but I think what we can say is that the vast majority of art historical scholarship and literature does not necessarily take those objects into account. Although certainly I’ve seen some positive changes in the kind of materials and objects that scholars are willing to interrogate in their work in the past twenty years. So that is nice to see. I think there are also people who study material culture and I feel a real affinity with those folks as well.
I’m really interested in these kinds of objects because of the ways in which I see them being situated in the lives of people, and I am also interested in how they have been positioned in art history and teasing out those sorts of historiographies. The ways in which history gets built, and the way in which objects are talked about. Thinking about the biases and hierarchies within art histories and the ways in which these objects that maybe aren’t as prominent in what we think of as canonical narratives are actually quite central and entangled with all of the other objects that are part of our canonical histories. They have so much to tell us about everything that was happening at the time of the prevailing dominant modernism. You have what I think of as alternative modernisms that are also sort of going on, and it’s all very much enmeshed. The only reason it becomes separate narratives is because of the operations of history, and that’s quite intriguing.
TG: Sure, and I think that everything you said makes senses based on the article you wrote for this book because what I saw there was the way that these figures who were educated at the Black Mountain College in textile work came to be involved in art education on a broader scale.
So going from there, the title of your article starts with “Following the Thread,” and I liked that because I think it’s a metaphor for the process of research and scholarship generally. I’m curious if there was a specific thread that started your research process with the subject you were writing about here.
EW: I’m so delighted that you picked up on this question and metaphor of the thread. I think for me, I was very interested in the thread of this person: Else Regensteiner. I first encountered her work when I was a curator at the Art Institute, and the Textiles Collection had really a good amount of her work. There had been an exhibition featuring her work called Rooted in Chicago and it was all about different designers in Chicago. Hers really captured my attention because I could see that she was a figure that was connected to many different areas of interest that I had, and I wanted to understand her significance.
There was a great biography that had been written about her, and I also knew that the Ryerson and Burnham Archives at the Art Institute had all of her papers. And so it seemed like a really good opportunity. She’s not a figure that has received as much attention in the broader scholarship. She’s gotten attention in Chicago because here is where she was and she certainly was mentioned in other volumes, but I really wanted to think about the significance of her impact, and all of the people that she was connected to. And really think about her as a model for the ways in which people such as herself who were artists, teachers, and lecturers also had their studio practice, their business. There was this way in which she exemplifies a real model for artistic activity and production in this moment. So, I felt like if we follow her and tell her story she will help illuminate other stories. I hope that that comes through when we touch on like, Lili Blumenau in the article especially. She’s another figure where I think there’s another thread to follow.
TG: Yeah, that definitely makes sense because I was curious about that when I was reading. I think it definitely comes through in the writing that you were guided by the work of specific people that broadened out to all these different connections with the general development of weaving as a practice.
Because the essay is published in this larger volume that’s an anthology with other writers who are tackling the same topic of the Black Mountain College weaving classes, how did your get involved with this project? Were you working on the essay beforehand and then you found out about the collection? Or were you approached to write something specifically for the collection?
EW: This is an interesting question because it’s definitely something that I remember wondering, like, “How do these things happen? How are these connections made?” So, what happened was that in 2019 I curated an exhibition called Weaving Beyond the Bauhaus. That was at the Art Institute, and that show is really what started my interest in Else Regensteiner. I had interest before, but that show was a great opportunity to pursue further research on her, and the show included the work of a number of artists. It was Anni Albers, Else Regensteiner, Gunta Stölzl, Sheila Hicks, Lenore Tawney, Claire Zeisler, Yvonne Bobrowicz, Ethel Stein, and others. That show was all about the relationships between artists and connecting them to the Bauhaus, but thinking beyond the German Bauhaus in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin.
This project got the attention of Julie and Michael who are the editors of the volume. They wrote me a nice email and they wanted to meet and talk about this project they were working on which was this exhibition Weaving at Black Mountain College. That was in 2020 that they reached out and we met on Zoom. We chatted and I was very excited. I had initially hoped the exhibition would come to the Art Institute but then I ended up leaving the Art Institute. They stayed in touch and the conversation was just: “Here’s what we’re looking at. What do you think about this? We’re really interested in how many students took weaving classes and how there was this culture of weaving at Black Mountain and that’s not really been written about.” This was amazing for me to hear because it seems really important. They were doing all this great research and so then I also suggested artists they might look at and texts they might look at that could be helpful for their project and their research. I think their scholarship was not necessarily textile focused before working on this project, and so they invited me to write for the catalog after we had met and corresponded on a couple occasions.
So, when it first started it was very much a nascent idea where they’re like: “Here’s what we’re thinking, we want to do this thing, we don’t know if it’s possible,” and I think that’s so exciting to think about. You have an idea and you don’t know necessarily how to make it happen, but they kept working away at it. They talked to the people at Black Mountain, and they met with the descendants of the artists there, and they did all of this research at the Western Reserve Archives. They sort of slowly built this project over a number of years. They asked me to think about the bigger picture. They were focusing closely on particular artists and stories at Black Mountain, and certainly that is part of what I’m doing, but I’m also using it as a touch point in my essay. That’s kind of what they were looking for in order to signal the “so what?” of this. So, “Weaving is a big deal at Black Mountain but what’s the longstanding impact of that?” And ongoing impact, really. That was where I came in.
TG: Alright, that’s awesome. I like hearing about that because it shows the really collaborative nature of scholarly work in general. It’s not always clear to—especially younger people in academia—how you get involved with bigger projects. I think your explanation shows how it’s sometimes an organic process or something that comes up and evolves into something over time.
EW: Yeah, and just building relationships with people, you know? I was like, “I’m interested in this project,” and they were interested in my work. We just chatted and it seemed like there was a good opportunity there. Interestingly, because I was just contributing to the book and not in charge of it, they had said “Oh, submit your essay by this deadline,” so I wrote my essay and sent it in. Quite amusingly, when the show opened and I went to the conference they had, I talked to Michael and Julie, and Michael said “Oh, we were writing our essays like six months after you submitted yours.” Because they’re not just writing an essay, they’re getting the loans, and talking to artists, and artists’ families about getting loans. There’s so many components to a project like this and it was a small team. Maybe you’ve experienced this: you go to write something and you’re like, “This isn’t anything! Why am I doing this? What am I even saying?” and Michael totally said “Oh, I had this moment where I read your essay and it’s like, yeah! We do have something here!” It was so nice because I was sort of like “I’m done with this now. Onto whatever next thing I’m panicking about.” And to just know that I provided this small bit of comfort is very nice to know.
TG: Yeah, that’s great. It is always so interesting to see and realize that other people find your work interesting or engaging even when you yourself are maybe unsure. It really helps that process of believing in what you’re doing.
So, I’m curious about how you went about finding the research materials that you eventually used in the essay. I know you mentioned that Regensteiner’s papers were held in an archive at the Art Institute, so was that the main source for you?
EW: Yes, that was really valuable for me and the librarians there were super helpful. I already had some bibliography built up from when I worked on the exhibition and so I knew where to look for some of that material about her. The archive was essential and also the beautiful organization of this particular archive was extremely helpful. I was able to pull the things that I was interested in looking at. And of course, I ended up looking at many more things that I didn’t need but that also still helped me get some context for: “Who is this person? And what was she doing?” You probably noticed in the footnotes a lot of primary documents about her time at the School of the Art Institute teaching. She kept very good records in terms of her appointment letters and promotions and correspondence about what was happening. But interesting secondary materials were included that then pointed me to other things that I might look at. Through my previous research, I was aware of a couple periodicals that I knew would be really helpful, which were American Craft and Handweaver and Craftsman.
Regensteiner was a very important figure, and then seeing who else she was touching on: “Who are these people, right?” Like Blumenau especially, not a lot has been written about her, but even finding one piece that was written about her after she died talking about her impact—that is really useful. So, kind of pointing out: “here are some key things about her and let me go use that as a way to then follow up on where she’s been, what’s she been doing.” A WorldCat search isn’t really going to get you there always. You sometimes have to really delve in and look in specific publications. Sometimes you just don’t find anything and sometimes you do! So, like the advertisements that Blumenau posted about her studio and the classes she was offering, and the announcements that appeared in Women’s Wear Daily. It’s a lot of just following the thread and seeing, “Does this thread take me to a little ball of something, or has it just unwound and okay, this is interesting but maybe not much there to continue pursuing.” That was a long answer, I apologize.
TG: No, no I think it’s valuable. I’m actually taking a course right now that’s about working with archives from a cinema perspective, specifically lost film objects. So, I think a lot of things you touch on about how to piece together a larger argument or big picture out of a lot of disparate materials and different kinds of historical documents is very relevant to all kinds of research in various humanities disciplines.
There’s definitely a through line in your article about the relationship between pedagogy and practice, with the way that Regensteiner and Blumenau were taking what they learned at Black Mountain College into their own making of textiles and these weaving projects. So, I’m curious about the practice of making art and teaching art. How do you see that being particularly relevant to textiles and material cultures that you’re interested in?
EW: Interesting. Well, I think for this particular project it proved quite important to connect those two because this is sort of at the crux of the legacy of the Bauhaus where it is an educational space, and it was about collaboration and coming together. But then, also about the actual production of items. As you may know, the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus in Germany was the most successful workshop in terms of producing and selling goods. This is a really interesting legacy when we think about the Bauhaus style education coming to the U.S due to the immigration of quite a number of artists who had studied and trained there. And of course, I talk about Marli Ehrman and Anni Albers probably the most in the essay. I think of Marli Ehrman—this is a project I actually hope to work on this summer—but very little has surfaced of her work, and I hope that we can find more of that. But, with Anni Albers there’s quite a lot and there is a way in which the pedagogy and the practice very much go hand in hand.
Initially at the Bauhaus there was some tension in terms of who would lead the workshop. When Gunta Stölzl, who was an actual weaver, becomes the leader it’s like this real empowering moment of “I am a weaver I am an artist and I am a teacher,” and I think that legacy is quite profound in its reach, if we think about the long-armed reach of the Bauhaus weaving workshop. I think we see it at Black Mountain, and I think Else Regensteiner also picked that up from Marli Ehrman who is really an interesting figure. She starts teaching at the New Bauhaus Institute—by the time she starts teaching it’s the Institute of Design here—and then goes on to open a design shop in Oak Park, I believe. So, she has this total commercial business that she operates which is selling these modern designed objects for people to buy for their home.
But I think in part too, because so much of the pedagogy is invested in what Anni Albers called “starting at zero,” like “pretend you don’t know anything about weaving. You don’t know what a thread is.” So, just starting at zero and kind of learning all of those pieces, then when you have done that, you also know how to provide that type of educational experience. And that’s not to say Black Mountain or the Institute of Design were entirely reproducing the Bauhaus, but we definitely see a huge impact of that. And just a lack of fear when it comes to experimentation, like in teaching and in practice.
TG: Yeah, I definitely picked up on that lack of fear in terms of what a lot of the artists were doing in the essay with using materials from nature incorporated into the big weaving works. That was really interesting to me.
I have a couple more questions. My first one is: what advice do you have to current MAPH students or MAPH alumni in terms of working in academia and making writing, research, collaboration a regular practice?
EW: I think my recommendation is: if you want to write, you have to write. It can be this enormous challenge, and so I guess my next recommendation is, try to parcel out the writing into a reasonable amount of words per day that you know you can accomplish based on the time you set aside to write. So set aside time to write and think about: “I’m gonna have an hour a day to write, I’m gonna have two hours a day that I’m gonna designate for writing. And within those two hours, I commit to writing 250 words. And I’m gonna block it off in my calendar and I’m going to sit down and I’m going to do it. And what I’m not going to do is write ten words and then, like, go read the New York Times for forty minutes.”
So, the way to avoid that is: say you’re going to write for thirty minutes, you set a timer, and then after thirty minutes you take a five minute break. You get a drink of water, you stretch your legs, you pet your cat. Or maybe if things are going well you’re like “actually I’m in it, I’m gonna keep going.” And you can keep going. I think treats in different kinds of forms can be helpful. You tell yourself: “This week I’m going to write a total of 1000 words, and if I write 1000 words, on Saturday I’m gonna go meet my friends for dinner or drinks, or I’m gonna treat myself to a quiet evening at home on the couch with a cup of tea reading or watching whatever I want.” I think breaking down a writing project into small components that are like bites, and then when you’re done you have a whole meal. Or a whole essay. I find that can be really helpful.
Starting is very hard too. Even if you’re like “this is terrible what I started,” it’s okay. You started and you don’t have to turn that in, you don’t have to submit that for publication. You can delete it all and go again, or you can leave it and start again. I do that all the time. I start, and then I’m like “I don’t like this,” and then I just enter, enter, and start again. And then maybe I’ll enter, enter again and start again, and then I’m like “Oh, here we go.” Then maybe I take a sentence from the above and delete everything I don’t need. So, don’t be afraid to delete things. And don’t be afraid of writing something bad because we all write bad things sometimes and you can just delete them.
TG: It’s great advice. At least in my experience with trying to make writing a regular habit, you get in the mode where it feels like every time you write it’s the first time you’ve ever written. So, I think you have to get used to that feeling almost [laughs].
Alright, for my last question: What are you currently working on now or something you’ll be working on in the future that you want to plug or talk about?
EW: Sure, yeah. So I am hoping to write a journal article about Marli Ehrman and I think the challenge I face is that it’s quite difficult to track her down in this moment. What I mean by that is that it’s not like there’s a Marli Ehrman Archive somewhere. So, what this project is going to involve is trying to find the traces and mentions of her in places where I think she might be. It’s going to be a lot of combing through things and seeing what turns up. I went to the archive at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which now encompasses the Institute of Design, and they have the New Bauhaus archives. I found a couple of things related to her there, but I think what I’m quite interested in is potentially going to Hull House and seeing if they might have anything related to her and her work there. I’m really trying to figure out more about her shop as well, and seeing business records, newspaper advertisements, magazine articles about it. It’s going to be a lot of thinking laterally instead of finding the thing and going in and delving down. I just think she deserves a bit more in terms of her significance being detailed more precisely.
I’m also working on a project related to Lenore Tawney, who is all part of this story. She studied at the Institute of Design with Alexander Archipenko, Emerson Woelffer, and Marli Ehrman. She’s a very major figure in what we would think of as the second half of the twentieth century in fiber art, really in art broadly. I have a fellowship in 2025 so I’m going to do some preliminary preparations for that—exploring and thinking about color theories that inform her practice, and really doing some background investigation. When the fellowship starts, I’ll have the opportunity to go to the Kohler Arts Center and Art Preserve which is up in Wisconsin. They have her studio and a bunch of archival materials there, and there’s the Lenore Tawney Foundation in New York. I hope to go to both locations and deepen the investigation on that front. I’m also working on an exhibition that opens this summer, and that is a contemporary tapestry exhibition. It’s called Beyond Tapestry: Expanded, and that is opening at the Peeler Art Center at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana at the end of August and will run through December 15th of this year. The writing for that is done mercifully, but there’s still a lot of logistical work to be done there.
TG: That all sounds excellent, and I hope that all of that will turn out well for you. It sounds like exciting research.
EW: Yes, I’m very excited about it. It will be nice to have some time to devote to that, and not be thinking about a lot of other things. That’s not a complaint, it’s just always very nice to have a quiet moment to just focus.
TG: Absolutely, we all need that. Well, if you have anything else you’d like to add, feel free. If not, we can conclude the interview here.
EW: Thank you so much, Tony. I really appreciate it.
TG: Thank you!
Prof. Erica Warren is a first-year MAPH Preceptor and Assistant Instructional Professor affiliated with the University of Chicago’s Department of Art History.
Tony George (’24) is a one-year MAPH student and Editorial Fellow for Issue II of Common Forms. He studies in the departments of Cinema & Media Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies where he focuses on depictions of transgressive sexuality and gender identity in cinema.