Spring, Rain, Wind, Sun

Ethel Stein’s interest in color, abstraction, and geometry can be traced back to her studies in the 1930s with artist Josef Albers (1888–1976), who trained at the German Bauhaus school, where doing away with the distinction between fine and applied arts was an explicit goal. Stein began weaving in the 1960s and developed her own approach to contemporary textile expression by using a drawloom, which allows individual control of each warp thread (the threads running vertically on the loom). In this double-weave textile (weaving two complete and interconnected textiles at the same time), Stein employed two sets of warp and weft threads and included pieces of Japanese paper between the two layers of cloth.