Learning From

Paul Klee, Carpet, 1927, pen on paper on cardboard, © 2017 Christie’s Images Limited.

Book cover of Ernst Fuhrmann: Tlinkit und Haida, Folkwang Verlag GmbH, Hagen 1922.
Raoul D’Harcourt: Textiles of Ancient Peru and their Techniques, University of Washington Press, Seattle 1962.

Arthur Baessler collection, Shirt, Tiahuanaco (=Tiwanaku), 0–700 (?), Peru
© Ethnologisches Museum der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, photo: Claudia Obrocki.
Anni Alber, Black–White–Gray, 1927, © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019.

Josef Albers, Loggia Wall at RIT, 1967
The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundatio / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019.
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Rose Slivka, "New Tapestry", in: Craft Horizons, March/April 1963
Lena Bergner, Draft of a hand loom, ca. 1936–39, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation
© American Craft Council / Heirs to Lena Bergner.

Eduard Gaffron Collection, Khipu, Inca 1450–1550, Huacho, Peru
© Photo: Ethnologisches Museum der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, photo: Claudia Obrocki.

Anne Wilson, "Net Fence" detail, 1975, Cotton and jute cord, raffia, bamboo supports, 96 x 45 x 20 inches overall.
Courtesy of the artist.

Lenore Tawney, Mask, ca. 1967, Linen, pre-Columbian beads, shell, horsehair
Photos: George Erml; Courtesy: Lenore G. Tawney Foundation.
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Marguerite Wildenhain, Double Face pot, 1960–70, Luther College, Decorah, photo: Grant Watson, © Luther College.

Kader Attia, Signs of Reappropriation as Repair, 2017, Single projection of 80 slides, Courtesy of the artist.

from: Maghreb Art Magazine, No. 3, 1965, © Mohamed Melehi.

Poster exhibition of Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Chabâa, Mohamed Melehi, Théâtre National
Mohamed V, design: Mohamed Melehi, 1965, Toni Maraini Collection, © Mohamed Melehi.
Painted ceiling of Mohamed Melehi, Hotel Les Roses du Dades, Kelaa M'Gouna, 1968–69
Architects: cabinet Faraoui et de Mazières, archives: Faraoui et de Mazières.

Door from the Musée Tiskiwin, Collection of Bert Flint, photo: Maud Houssais.
Departing from Paul Klee’s drawing of a North African kilim, the edition Learning From foregrounds an interest at the Bauhaus in the vernacular and the premodern as well as in the social value of craft. This interest, reflected in the collection of the Bauhaus library, included European folk art, the decorative arts of North Africa and the Near East as well as the ancient civilizations of the Americas.
While this is relating to an early twentieth-century “primitivist” discourse, at the Bauhaus, things such as African and Andean patterns and techniques were carefully studied by masters and students in order to innovate from within their own culture and to synthesize this knowledge into modern designs. In mid-twentieth-century North America, Bauhaus practices, evolved through contact with ancient as well as contemporary indigenous cultures, became the source for formal as well as technical developments, particularly in the field of weaving. In North Africa, as part of the process of decolonization, an engagement with local crafts took on a political meaning, including in establishing new art school curricula, away from the Beaux-Arts education still based on orientalism, figurative art, and the division of the applied (low) and fine (high) arts. And in Brazil, a generation of cultural practitioners, including artists, architects, and pedagogues partially oriented through a relation with the Bauhaus, experienced a pull towards the marginal as a way to produce a break from the hegemony of European modernism.
Learning From tracks this history of appropriation through a series of geographies and time periods. It asks who produces the craft object, who learns, and who profits from it. Here, craft becomes a symbolic and political medium, highlighting various positionalities, including the North African Berber, the Andean weaver and the women of the Fibre Art movement.






from: Shuttle-Craft Bulletin, March 1941.
from: Black Mountain College Bulletin, No. 5, 1938.
Publié dans: Maghreb Art, 1966.
Courtesy of Mohammed Melehi and Toni Maraini.
Publié dans: Integral, No. 12–13, 1978.
Courtesy of Toni Maraini.
Publié dans: Souffles, No. 7–8, 1967.
Courtesy of Abdellatif Laâbi.
Part I. from: Shuttle-Craft Bulletin, 1957.
Part II from: Shuttle-Craft Bulletin, 1957.
from: Black Mountain College Bulletin, Vol. 6, No. 4, May 1948. Reproduced with permission of North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Oral history interview, 2004 February 3 and March 11.
from: Denise Y. Arnold & Elvira Espejo: The Andean Science of Weaving, Thames & Hudson Ltd. London 2015, pp. 18–44.
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