On September 18, 1899, Anni Albers was born in Berlin into a prosperous Jewish family that gave her access to one of the most consequential art schools of the twentieth century and then watched the century do its worst. She enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1922, intending to study painting and glass. She was assigned to the weaving workshop.

The Bauhaus assigned women to the weaving workshop. The school's founding prospectus had declared equal access regardless of sex; the reality was that women who applied for painting, sculpture, or architecture were redirected to the "women's workshop," which was weaving. Anni Albers spent the next decade making the weaving workshop the most innovative textile studio in the world.

She developed textiles that functioned as both art and industrial design: sound-absorbing wall coverings for the ADGB Trade Union School, experimental fabrics for the German industry market, and works of pure abstraction that she understood as belonging to the same tradition as the paintings and prints around her. The Bauhaus painters — Klee, Kandinsky, Itten — were exhibited in galleries. The weavers' work was discussed as applied arts.

She and her husband Josef Albers fled Nazi Germany in 1933, one of the few Jewish Bauhaus masters to escape before the war. They came to Black Mountain College in North Carolina. She continued weaving and began printmaking. The Museum of Modern Art gave her a solo exhibition in 1949 — the first solo show MoMA had given to a textile artist.

She received the Order of Merit from West Germany in 1967. The Bauhaus centennial exhibitions in 2019 prominently featured the male painters.