Black Mountain College

The main building of the former Black Mountain College, on the grounds of Camp Rockmont, a summer camp for boys.

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.

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 and Hampshire College to Evergreen State College and Shimer College, among others.

For the first eight years, the college rented the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly buildings south of Black Mountain town. 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), 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.

Faculty and alumni

Among those who taught there in the 1940s and 1950s were:

Josef and Anni Albers, Eric Bentley, Alfred Kazin, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Max Dehn, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Duncan, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Lou Harrison, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, Richard Lippold, Charles Olson, M. C. Richards, Albert William Levi, Ben Shahn, Jack Tworkov, and Robert Motherwell.

Guest lecturers included Albert Einstein, Clement Greenberg, Bernard Rudofsky, Richard Lippold and William Carlos Williams.

Ceramic artists Peter Voulkos and Robert C. Turner taught there as well.

Notable alumni

• Ruth Asawa
• Fielding Dawson
• Arthur Penn
• Charles Perrow
• Michael Rumaker
• Robert Rauschenberg
• Dorothea Rockburne
• Susan Weil
• John Chamberlain
• Ray Johnson
• Kenneth Noland
• Oli Sihvonen
• Joel Oppenheimer
• Jonathan Williams
• Robert De Niro, Sr.
• Cy Twombly
• Basil King
• Nicholas Cernovich
• Lyle Bongé
• Claude Stoller
• Kenneth Snelson

The college ran summer institutes from 1944 till its closing in 1956.

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.

Further Reading

• Harris, Mary Emma (2002). The Arts at Black Mountain College. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-58212-4.

• Katz, Vincent (ed.) (2003). Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-60071-2. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)

• Lane, Marvin (ed.) (c1990). Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds: an Anthology of Personal Accounts. University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 978-0-870-49663-9. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help); Check date values in: |year= (help)

External links

• Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
• The Black Mountain College Project
• Black Mountain College: Collections in the North Carolina State Archives
• 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.
• Black Mountain College Celebration 75th Anniversary of Black Mountain College
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