Black Mountain College
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Black Mountain College, founded in 1933 near Asheville, North Carolina, was known as one of the leading progressive schools in the United States. It ceased operations in 1957. Although it lasted only about twenty-three years and enrolled fewer than 1,200 students, Black Mountain College was one of the most fabled experimental institutions in art education and practice, launching a remarkable number of the artists who spearheaded the avant-garde in the America of the 1960s. It boasted an extraordinary curriculum in the visual, literary, and performing arts, and its legacy continues to influence an alternative educational philosophy and practice.
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[edit] History
Founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier and other former faculty of Rollins College, Black Mountain was experimental by nature and committed to an interdisciplinary approach, attracting a faculty which included many of America's leading visual artists, poets, and designers.
Operating in a relatively isolated rural location with little budget, Black Mountain College inculcated an informal and collaborative spirit, and over its lifetime attracted a venerable roster of instructors. Some of the innovations, relationships and unexpected connections formed at Black Mountain would prove to have a lasting influence on the postwar American art scene, high culture, and eventually pop culture. Buckminster Fuller met student Kenneth Snelson at Black Mountain, and the result was the first geodesic dome (improvised out of slats in the school's back yard); Merce Cunningham formed his dance company; and John Cage staged his first happening.
Not a haphazardly conceived venture, Black Mountain College was a consciously directed liberal arts school that grew out of the progressive education movement. In its day it was a unique educational experiment for the artists and writers who conducted it, and as such an important incubator for the American avant garde. Black Mountain proved to be an important precursor to and prototype for many of the alternative colleges of today ranging from the University of California, Santa Cruz to Hampshire College and Evergreen State College, among others.
Black Mountain College officially ceased operations in 1956; the property was later purchased and converted to an ecumenical Christian boys' residential summer camp, which later became a long-time location of the Black Mountain Festival and the Lake Eden Arts Festival. A number of the original structures are still in use as lodgings and/or administrative facilities.
[edit] Faculty and alumni
Among those who taught there in the 1940s and 1950s were Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Max Dehn, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Lou Harrison, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, Richard Lippold, Charles Olson, M. C. Richards, Ben Shahn, Jack Tworkov, and Robert Motherwell. Guest lecturers included Albert Einstein, Clement Greenberg, Bernard Rudofsky, and William Carlos Williams. Ceramic artists Peter Voulkos and Robert C. Turner taught there as well.
Among the notable alumni of Black Mountain College are Fielding Dawson, Michael Rumaker, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, Susan Weil, John Chamberlain, Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland, Oli Sivhonen, Joel Oppenheimer, Jonathan Williams, Ruth Asawa, Robert De Niro, Sr., Cy Twombly, Basil King, and Kenneth Snelson. The college ran summer institutes from 1944 till its closing in 1956.
[edit] Black Mountain poets
Various avant-garde poets (subsequently known as the Black Mountain poets) were drawn to the school through the years, most notably Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Jonathan Williams, Ed Dorn and Robert Creeley. Creeley was hired to teach and to edit the Black Mountain Review in 1955, and when he left two years later for San Francisco, he became the link between the Black Mountain poets and the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Through Allen Ginsberg, a link with the Beat generation writers of Greenwich Village was initiated.
[edit] External links
- Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
- The Black Mountain College Project
- Fully Awake: Black Mountain College Documentary the first and only documentary solely on Black Mountain College. The story of BMC is weaved through interviews with students, professors and modern scholars with archival footage and photographs.
- 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.
