Anni Albers, Line Involvements IV, 1964

Jennie Goldstein: Line Involvements is a series of lithographs by the artist Anni Albers, a group of works that she made in 1964. Anni Albers is best known as a weaver, a textile maker, someone who made textiles often specifically to be hung on the wall as opposed to usable, functional things. And she did that for decades.

Narrator: In 1963, a year before making this series, Albers permanently shifted her focus from textiles to lithographs.

Jennie Goldstein: And in Line Involvements, what’s so interesting is that you can see that although she’s working with a print medium, the thread, the sense of the individual string or strand that makes up a textile, a woven thing, is still there. It’s still apparent. It gets more and more complicated, successively ornate, and interlocking and interwoven as the series progresses. So it shares with textiles the same kind of fundamental questions about what can a line do. And what does a series of strings or strands do when they come into a kind of communication with each other? 

Narrator: There are seven prints in this series. Because prolonged exposure to light will damage works on paper, we’re showing them only three at a time—rotating them on and off view. The display will always include a print from near the beginning, middle, and end of the series.