passages from "Work with Material," by Anni Albers

Life today is very bewildering. We have no picture of it which is all-inclusive, such as former times may have had. We have to make a choice between concepts of great diversity. And as a common ground is wanting, we are baffled by them...

We use materials to satisfy our practical needs and to our spiritual needs as well. We have useful things and beautiful things -- equipment and works of art. In earlier civilizations there was no clear separation of this sort...

But most important to one's growth is to see oneself leave the safe ground of accepted conversations and to find oneself alone and self-dependent. It is an adventure which can permeate one's whole being. Self-confidence can grow. And a longing for excitement can be satisfied without external means, within oneself; for creating is the most intense excitement one can come to know.

-- Anni Albers, "Work with Material," from "Black Mountain College Bulletin, no. 5, November 1938, reprinted in Anni Albers, "Selected Writings on Design (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), pp. 6-7.

(quoted from p. 31 of "Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art," edited by Vincent Katz (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002))