Olga de Amaral · 2024

In another photograph taken approximately two years earlier she is seen again at the bot- tom right of the image, this time tucked into the opening of a brick fireplace in a gallery where her work is exhibited. Here she is sur- rounded by both the white walls of the space and the airy, crisscrossed threads and braids of her early hanging weavings. These pieces were the precursors to Amaral’s successful series of Muros tejidos (Woven Walls, 1969– 72)—thick, fiber panels that hover in space or twist and spill themselves to the ground. Strips, braids, and threads have formed the building blocks for Amaral’s body of work wo- ven on and off the loom, rather than built of stone from the ground up. This work is drawn from a particular place and time, yet open enough to expand those same coordinates. Amaral was not the first textile artist to explore the drystone walls and stepped ter- races of Machu Picchu. She was following in the footsteps of Bauhaus-trained weaver Anni Albers, who had visited the historic site on at least one of the many trips she made to South America from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. In the pre-Columbian architecture and textiles of Mexico and Peru both Anni and Josef Albers found a set of principles on which to build their own visions of Modernist abstraction. 1 Anni Albers’s interest in Andean culture and weaving was first aroused in the museums of Berlin in the early decades of the 20th century and deepened when she later moved to North America. Amaral, on the other hand, was born in Colombia and has drawn upon the rich cul- tural landscape of the country and the wider region within which she has lived for most of her life. She became the only Latin American artist to make her name within the transna- tional networks of Fiber Art (as it was known in North America) and New Tapestry (as it was known in Europe) in the 1960s and 1970s. Her work has been interpreted as an artistic continuation of the ancient and Indigenous practices of weaving within South America, and it is true that she has made these refer- ences. Yet Amaral is also an international art- ist, educated in the United States and widely traveled, who has presented her work on the world stage. Olga de Amaral (née Olga Ceballos Vélez) originally trained in architectural drafting at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in Bogotá in 1951. Leaving Colombia in 1954 at a time of escalating violence, 2 she decided to continue her studies in North America at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan. It was here that she was introduced to weaving. Amaral studied with the Finnish textile de- signer Marianne Strengell (1909–98), who left Europe and took up a teaching post in the US before the outbreak of World War II. Strengell arrived at Cranbrook on the in- vitation of the college’s visionary Finnish- American architect Eliel Saarinen and his wife Loja Saarinen, who founded the Department of Weaving and Textile Design. Her curriculum focused heavily on the possi- bilities of texture created by weave structure and fiber content. The daughter of an archi- tect father and a designer mother, Strengell established herself as an industrial and inte- rior designer. A Bauhaus philosophy was in evi- dence at Cranbrook, where the approach was cross-disciplinary and experimental. The school had opened in 1932, just as theBauhaus was closing in Dessau, Germany. International connections were made when several of the Bauhaus masters (or “Bauhauslers”) were in- vited to visit the newly established Cranbrook Academy. Within this pedagogical environ- ment weaving was seen as a practice that 1 Anni and Josef Albers moved to North America in 1933, taking up teaching posts at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. They later moved to New Haven, Connecticut, when Josef was offered the position of Head of Design at Yale University in 1950. The Albers were seen as representatives of a Bauhaus philosophy and pedagogical practice in the US. For more on this and on the transnational Bauhaus, see Hal Foster, “The Bauhaus Idea in America,” in Achim Borchardt- Hume (ed.), Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World (London: Tate Publishing, 2006) and Marion von Osten and Grant Watson (eds.), Bauhaus Imaginista (London: Thames and Hudson, 2019). 2 Between 1948 and 1957, Colombia went through a period of violent civil war. Known as La Violencia, this war was caused by the opposition between militants from the Colombian Conservative party and those from the Colombian Liberal Party. An estimated 200,000 people were killed and two million others migrated to other countries or were displaced. 3 Olga de Amaral, “The House of My Imagination,” lecture given at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on April 24, 2003, republished here on pp. 129–35. “Tapestry, fibers, strands, units, cords, all are transparent layers with their own meanings, revealing each other to make one pre- sence, one tone that speaks about the texture of time.” 3 Opposite: Olga de Amaral, Galería T.A.B., Bogotá, 1966 10 11