Anni Albers, Alexander Reed

During their trip to Mexico in 1935/36, Josef and Anni Albers begin collecting figures and artefacts representing Mexican culture. Anni Albers returns to Black Mountain College with her impressions from the trip and focuses on jewellery design. Together with Alexander Reed, a student she had become friendly with, she experiments with everyday objects and creates a remarkable collection of jewellery. They do not use valuable materials like pearls, gold or silver for their experiments. Instead, they use and misappropriate everyday objects like washers, brass eyelets, corks, hairclips, rubber rings, plughole strainers or paperclips. In a talk she gives in 1942, Anni Albers says of the process:

“We had the sense that our experiments might make a contribution to pointing out the purely ephemeral value we assigned to objects … we tried to show that mental values are really more predominant … our work points out that jewels were no longer the preserve of the few but the property of everyone who could look around and were open for the beauty of simple things around us.”

The material cost of a piece of jewellery is not the key to its value; rather it is a spiritual aspect that the designer puts into it. To create the necklace shown here, Albers and Reed attach a round plughole strainer to an industrially produced chain – using paperclips. More paperclips hang from the bottom edge of the strainer, forming a garland. For another necklace, Albers and Reed thread metal washers onto a red grosgrain ribbon.