Black Mountain College was an experimental college founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and several others. Based in Black Mountain, North Carolina, the school was ideologically organized around John Dewey's principles of education, which emphasized holistic learning and the study of art as central to a liberal arts education. Many of the school's faculty and students were or would go on to become highly influential in the arts, including such people as Josef and Anni Albers, Walter Gropius, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Allen Ginsberg, among others. Although it was quite notable during its lifetime, the school closed in 1957 after 24 years due to funding issues. The history and legacy of Black Mountain College are preserved and extended by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center located in downtown Asheville, NC.
Video Black Mountain College
History
Black Mountain was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, Frederick Georgia, and Ralph Lounsbury, who were controversially dismissed as faculty from Rollins College for refusing to sign a loyalty pledge. The school was experimental by nature and committed to an interdisciplinary approach, prioritizing art making as a necessary component of education and attracting a faculty and lecturers that included many of America's leading visual artists, composers, poets, and designers. Operating in a relatively isolated rural location with little budget, Black Mountain depended upon its students and faculty. During the 1930s and 1940s the school flourished, becoming well known as an incubator for artistic talent. Notable events at the school were common, it was here that the first large-scale geodesic dome was made by faculty member Buckminster Fuller and students, where Merce Cunningham formed his dance company, and where John Cage staged his first musical happening.
Maps Black Mountain College
Structure
The school operated using non-hierarchical methodologies that placed students and educators on the same plane. Revolving around 20th century ideals about the value and important of balancing education, art and cooperative labour, students were required to participate in farm work, construction projects, and kitchen duty as part of their holistic education. The students were involved at all levels of institutional decision-making. They were also left in charge to decide when they were ready to graduate, which notoriously few ever did. There were no course requirements, grades or degrees. Graduates were presented with handcrafted diplomas as purely ceremonial symbols of their achievement. The liberal arts program offered at Black Mountain was broad, and supplemented by art making as a means of cultivating creative thinking within all fields. While Albers led the school, the only two requirements were a course on materials and form taught by Albers and a course on Plato.
Sociopolitical context
In 1933, the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus in Germany, a similarly progressive arts-based educational institution. Many of the school's faculty left Europe for the US, and a number of them settled at Black Mountain, most notably, Josef Albers, who was selected to run the art program and his wife Anni Albers, who taught weaving and textile design.
Adolph Hitler's rise to power and the subsequent persecution taking place in Europe led many artists and intellectuals to flee and resettle in the US, populating Black Mountain College with an influx of both students and faculty.
In addition, the college was operating in the South during the period of legal racial segregation at other colleges and universities in the region. While not immune from racial tensions, the student Alma Stone Williams, an African-American woman, is considered by some to be the first black student to enrol in an all-white institution of higher education in the South during the Jim Crow era.
Locations
For the first eight years the college rented the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly buildings south of Black Mountain, North Carolina. In 1941, it moved across the valley to its own campus at Lake Eden, where it remained until its closing in 1956. The property was later purchased and converted to an ecumenical Christian boys' residential summer camp (Camp Rockmont). This has been used for years as the site of the Black Mountain Festival and the Lake Eden Arts Festival. A number of the original structures are still in use as lodgings or administrative facilities.
Closing
Black Mountain College closed in 1957, a few years after Albers left to direct the first design department at Yale. The college suspended classes by court order due to debts, being unable to sustain their finances given the greatly decreased number of students. In 1962, the school's books were finally closed, with all debts covered.
Legacy
The Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center continues the legacy of Back Mountain College through talks, exhibitions, performances and an annual fall conference that examines the college's legacy. Black Mountain College was the subject of the museum exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957, which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston on October 10, 2015. The show was curated by Helen Molesworth with Ruth Erickson. The show later exhibited at the Hammer Museum February 21, 2016 to May 15, 2016, which was organized by Anne Ellegood, senior curator, with MacKenzie Stevens, curatorial assistant and January Parkos Arnall, curatorial assistant. Black Mountain College was featured in Nicholas Sparks' novel, The Longest Ride (2013) and the 2015 movie adaptation of the same name.
Notable Faculty and Alumni
Josef and Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Hazel Larson Archer, Eric Bentley, Harrison Begay, James Bishop, Ilya Bolotowsky,Josef Breitenbach, Carolyn Brown, John Cage, Harry Callahan, Mary Callery, John Chamberlain, Fritz Cohen, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Edward Dahlberg, Fielding Dawson, Jose De Creeft, Max Dehn, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Fiore, Jorge Fick, Tom Field, Joseph Fiore, Suzi Gablik, Allen Ginsberg, Anna and Natasha Goldowski, Paul Goodman, Lorrie Goulet, Francine du Plessix Gray, Mary "Molly" Gregory, Walter Gropius, Trude Guermonprez, Lou Harrison, Wesley Huss, Ray Johnson, Karen Karnes, Alfred Kazin, Franz Kline, Gwendolyn Knight, Tony Landreau, Jacob Lawrence, Denise Levertov, Albert William Levi, Leo Lionni, Richard Lippold, Katherine Litz, Edward Lowinsky, Gretel Lowinsky, Alvin Lustig, Jane Mayhall, Hilda Morley, Robert Motherwell, Peter Nemenyi, Beaumont Newhall, Kenneth Noland, Charles Olson, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, M. C. Richards, Ben Shahn, Aaron Siskind, Theodoros Stamos, David Tudor, Robert C. Turner, Cy Twombly, Jack Tworkov, Peter Voulkos, Susan Weil, Jonathan Williams, Emerson Woelffer, Stefan Wolpe, and William R. Wunsch.
Notable guest lecturers included: Albert Einstein, Clement Greenberg, Bernard Rudofsky, Richard Lippold, and William Carlos Williams.
See Also:
- Evergreen College
- Warren Wilson College
- Rochdale College
- Hampshire College
- Goddard College
- Marlboro College
- Goddard College
References
Bibliography
External links
- Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
- Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Hazel Larson Archer
- The Journal of Black Mountain College Studies
- The Black Mountain College Project
- Honoring the Mind's Eye article on Hazel Larsen Archer, a photographer who documented her years at the college in the 1940s and early '50s
- Bauhaus in America a documentary about the influence of the Bauhaus on America, including a segment on Black Mountain College with Anni Albers, Ted and Bobbi Dreier, et alia. produced and directed by Judith Pearlman, Cliofilm.
- Black Mountain College Celebration 75th Anniversary of Black Mountain College
- Asheville Art Museum
- Asheville, North Carolina, a National Park Service Discover Our Shared Heritage Travel Itinerary
- Finding Aid for the Black Mountain College Collection at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
- Finding Aid for Black Mountain College Publications at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
- University of Connecticut special collections related to Black Mountain writers
- Finding Aid of the Black Mountain College Photograph Collection, 1940 - 1945 at the State Archives of North Carolina's Western Regional Archives (Asheville)
- Finding Aid of the Black Mountain College Miscellaneous Collection, 1943 - 1945, 1975 - 2007 at the State Archives of North Carolina's Western Regional Archives (Asheville)
- Finding Aid of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Black Mountain College Research Project, 1933 - 1973 at the State Archives of North Carolina's Western Regional Archives (Asheville)
- Additional finding aids for the private papers of scholars, faculty, and students associated with Black Mountain College at the State Archives of North Carolina's Western Regional Archives (Asheville)
- Online archive of a portion of the State Archives of North Carolina's Black Mountain College collections
- "Buckminster Fuller's Experimental Finishing School," an excerpt from The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College by Eva Díaz.
- "Interview with Ati Gropius on her initial reluctance to attend Black Mountain College, studying with Josef Albers, and the like."
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