Lore Kadden Lindenfeld

Born in Elberfeld, Germany in 1921, Lore (Kadden) Lindenfeld attended the Art Academy in Düsseldorf to study fashion design in 1937, but, after only three semesters, her schooling was halted by the Nazis. Lindenfeld and her family fled to Holland in November of 1938, where she began to work as a seamstress in a workshop in which Queen Wilhelmina's clothes were made. By 1939, the artist and her family were living in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, where Lindenfeld continued to alter clothes for a living., Lindenfeld continued to pursue her education, enrolling in English Composition courses at Harvard and attending the Institute for Social Progress at Wellesley College.

While working in a local shop in the summer of 1945, Lindenfeld met Nan Oldenburg (Stoller Black), a young refugee who had studied at Black Mountain College, who convinced Lindenfeld to enroll for classes at Black Mountain College for the fall of 1945. The artist took a general curriculum, but, for her arts education, Lindenfeld studied watercolors with Josef Albers and, in the summer of 1946, took Anni Albers' class in Textile Design. Lindenfeld also studied with both Franziska Mayer and Trude Guermonprez (Elsesser); Guermonprez would have an impactful influence on Lindenfeld’s work and spent the summer of 1950 with Lindenfeld as part of a craft community at Pond Farm in California. Lindenfeld graduated in Weaving and Textile Design in August 1948, with Marli Ehrman as her examiner.

After her graduation in 1948, the artist moved to New York to seek employment in the textile industry. In her years working in the textile industry, Lindenfeld sought to fully understand the textile production process, from design to the implementation of power looms. She would also work with fashion garment designers, and her work was featured in fashion ads in Mademoiselle, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and American Fabrics. In 1953 Lore Kadden married Peter Lindenfeld, a physicist whom she had met at a presentation by John Cage at the Artists Club on Eighth Street. She left the textile industry to raise her two children, but later returned to the workforce to teach weaving at Middlesex County College in Edison, New Jersey for eighteen years. Since her Black Mountain College was not considered an accredited institution, she obtained her Master's Degree in Creative Arts Education from Rutgers in 1982. In 1985 Lindenfeld was recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship. The artist suffered a stroke in 2008 and later died at her home in Princeton in 2010.
Lindenfeld's work has been exhibited in group exhibitions and has been the subject of several one-person exhibitions including a retrospective, Lore Kadden Lindenfeld: A Life in Textiles at the Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center, Fiber graphics: Remembered Images in the Newark Museum, 1993. Her work was included in Bauhaus: Dessau - Chicago - New York at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany in 2000 and in Textile/Fiber/Thread at the Center for Book Arts in New York. In March 2010, Lore Lindenfeld had a retrospective exhibition at the Suzanne Patterson Center in Princeton. There has been a recently renewed interest in her work thanks to the exhibitions Contemporary International Tapestry at the Hunterdon Art Museum (2015), Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933-1957 at the Hammer Museum (October 2015- January 2016), and Dialogue: Lindenfeld + Lindenfeld at the Battleboro Museum and Art Center (2015).
Her work is in the collections of the Asheville Art Museum, the Renwick Gallery, National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; the Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center, The Fashion Institute of Technology, New York and the Museum of Art & Design (former American Craft Museum), and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

(Source: Museum staff)