Inspired by Josef Albers’s desire that it promote “the revelation and evocation of vision through art,” the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation has for many years lent support to innovative projects involving visual arts education. With an emphasis on serving underprivileged inner-city and rural youth, the Foundation has funded dozens of initiatives through a small discretionary grant program. Recipients have included:

• the Summer Youth Visual Arts Program of the Community Culture and Resource Center of Lexington, Mississippi, one of the nation’s lowest-income school districts;

• Paul Newman’s Hole-in-the-Wall Gang Camp in Ashford, Connecticut, where the Albers Foundation conducts art classes for campers (children with cancer and other serious diseases);

• the Center for Creative Youth at Wesleyan University, where arts education is used to help improve teenage students’ academic performance, enhance their social skills, and encourage community service;

• Outward Bound USA, which offers outdoor learning-through-experience programs that develop participants’ capacities of mind, body, and spirit; and

• the Shubert Performing Arts Center in New Haven, Connecticut, whose two-month “urban/suburban” exchange program for high school students involved a guided museum tour, a tour of the Albers Foundation headquarters, a performance of the play Art, talks, lectures, and art instruction workshops that culminated in an exhibition of the students’ art.

In addition to these programs, the Foundation is working to:

• produce an edition for young readers of Josef Albers’s seminal Interaction of Color;

• teach larger groups of children and adults about the art and ideas of Josef and Anni Albers;

• design and conduct a program of art education in collaboration with existing educational organizations; and

• continue and expand its involvement in programs such as Outward Bound that contribute to the broader life experiences of young people—through creative explorations that help them to “see” the world around them more clearly.

The Foundation occasionally augments these activities with programs in experiential education taking place in its woodland acreage, where the teaching of art as well as the teaching of certain outdoor skills is combined. The Foundation’s commitment here arises from the inspiration that both Josef and Anni Albers found in nature for the source of their abstractions in art, and also from the Alberses’ intense interest in effective practical means to achieve certain results. It is not unreasonable to compare the carabiners and harnesses and ropes used by rock climbers to an artist’s paints and canvas: the materials that need to be used properly and understood to assure a spiritual experience. In September 2001, the Foundation’s sponsorship of an Outward Bound rafting trip down the Colorado River exemplified Josef’s idea that experience is the best means of education. As Josef Albers wrote:

“[Practical work] teaches us that insight and skill depend on observation as well as on thought. And through manual work, as through art, we realize that there is, besides thinking in logical conclusions, “thinking in situations,” which is just as necessary as thinking in numbers or figures or verbal terms.”

“Thinking in situations” is, of course, fundamental to the making of an art work: a specific application of the concept that was vitally important to Josef Albers, and equally important to the fulfillment of the Albers Foundation’s mission today.