Although it was quite notable during its lifetime, the school closed in 1957 after 24 years due to funding issues; Camp Rockmont for Boys now sits on the campus' site.
Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, Frederick Georgia, and Ralph Lounsbury, who were dismissed as faculty from Rollins College in a seminal academic freedom incident, specifically for refusing to sign a loyalty pledge, for which Rollins was formally censured by the American Association of University Professors.[4] The institution was established to "avoid the pitfalls of autocratic chancellors and trustees and allow for a more flexible curriculum," and "with the holistic aim 'to educate a student as a person and a citizen.'"[5] The school was originally funded through a $10,000 gift from "Mac" Forbes, a former Rollins College faculty member, after the founders were unable to raise funds from traditional sources.[6]:7
Black Mountain was experimental in 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.[2] 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.[3] In the 1950s, the focus of the school shifted to the literary arts under the rectorship of Charles Olson. Olson founded The Black Mountain Review in 1954[7] and, together with his colleague and student Robert Creeley, developed the poetic school of Black Mountain poets.[8]
Main Building of the former Black Mountain College, on the current grounds of Camp Rockmont
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 importance of balancing education, art, and cooperative labor, students were required to participate in farm work, construction projects, and kitchen duty as part of their holistic education.[10][3][11]
The students were involved at all levels of institutional decision-making. They were also left in charge of deciding when they were ready to graduate, which notoriously few ever did. There were no course requirements, official grades (except for transfer purposes), or accredited 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.[11] While Josef Albers led the school, the only two requirements were a course on materials and form taught by Albers and a course on Plato.[3]
From 1933 to 1941, Black Mountain College was located at the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly.
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.[12]
Adolf 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.[13]
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 who enrolled at Black Mountain College in 1944, is considered by some to be the first black student to enroll in an all-white institution of higher education in the South during the Jim Crow era.[14] Notable African-American instructors included Carol Brice and Roland Hayes during the 1945 Summer Music Institute; Percy H. Baker, hired on full-time in 1945; Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight during the 1946 Summer Art Institute; and Mark Oakland Fax for the Spring 1946 quarter. The Julius Rosenwald Fund provided African-American teachers' salaries as well as student scholarships.[15]
In 1937, it purchased a 667-acre (270ha) property across the valley at Lake Eden.[6]:8 This property, developed by E.W. Grove (of the Grove Park Inn and Grove Arcade in Asheville) as a summer resort for residents of his nearby Grovemont neighborhood, included a gate house, dining hall, sleeping lodges, several cottages and other structures.[19][20]
In May 1941, following the end of their lease at Blue Ridge Assembly, the College moved its operations to Lake Eden, where it remained until its closing in 1957.[6]:8 Over these 16 years, College faculty, staff, and students established a working farm and constructed new buildings, including the iconic Studies Building designed by architect A. Lawrence Kocher, music rehearsal cubicles (Paul Beidler), the Service Building (Lawrence Kocher), the Science Building (Paul Williams, Dan Rice, and Stan Vanderbeek), the Minimum House (designed by students), the Jalowetz House (Lawrence Kocher),[20] and the Quiet House (a memorial to Mark Dreier designed by Alex "Bill" Reed).[21][22]
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, the Lake Eden Arts Festival (LEAF), and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center's {Re}HAPPENING. A number of the original structures are still in use as lodgings or administrative facilities, and two frescoes painted by Jean Charlot remain intact on the site.[23][24]
Closing
Black Mountain College closed in 1957, eight years after Albers left to direct the first design department at Yale. The college suspended classes by court order due to debts; the school was unable to sustain itself financially given the greatly decreased number of students. In 1962, the school's books were finally closed, with all debts covered.[25]
The Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center, founded in 1933, continues the legacy of Black Mountain College through talks, exhibitions, performances, collection and preservation, and an annual fall conference that examines the college's history and impact.
The Journal of Black Mountain College Studies is a multidisciplinary open-access digital publication that publishes articles, essays, and creative work related to the school and the individuals associated with it.[26]
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.[27] The show later exhibited at the Hammer Museum from February 21 to May 15, 2016.[28]
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro is a public research university in Greensboro, North Carolina. It is part of the University of North Carolina system. It is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges to award baccalaureate, master's, specialist, and doctoral degrees.
Op art, short for optical art, is a style of visual art that uses optical illusions.
Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as "New York's most famous unknown artist". Johnson also staged and participated in early performance art events as the founder of a far-ranging mail art network – the New York Correspondence School – which picked up momentum in the 1960s and is still active today. He is occasionally associated with members of the Fluxus movement but was never a member. He lived in New York City from 1949 to 1968, when he moved to a small town in Long Island and remained there until his suicide.
Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator who is considered one of the most influential 20th-century art teachers in the United States. Born in 1888 in Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany, into a Roman Catholic family with a background in craftsmanship, Albers received practical training in diverse skills like engraving glass, plumbing, and wiring during his childhood. He later worked as a schoolteacher from 1908 to 1913 and received his first public commission in 1918 and moved to Munich in 1919.
Rollins College is a private liberal arts college in Winter Park, Florida. It was founded in November 1885 and has about 30 undergraduate majors and several master's programs. Florida's fourth oldest post-secondary institution, it has an approximate enrollment of 3,000 students, composed of roughly 2,500 undergraduates and 500 postgraduates.
Peter Voulkos was an American artist of Greek descent. He is known for his abstract expressionist ceramic sculptures, which crossed the traditional divide between ceramic crafts and fine art. He established the ceramics department at the Los Angeles County Art Institute and at UC Berkeley.
Daniel Rhodes was an American artist, known as a ceramic artist, muralist, sculptor, author and educator. During his 25 years (1947–1973) on the faculty at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, in Alfred, New York, he built an international reputation as a potter, sculptor and authority on studio pottery.
Anni Albers was a German-Jewish visual artist and printmaker. A leading textile artist of the 20th century, she is credited with blurring the lines between traditional craft and art. Born in Berlin in 1899, Fleischmann initially studied under impressionist painter Martin Brandenburg from 1916 to 1919 and briefly attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg in 1919. She later enrolled at the Bauhaus, an avant-garde art and architecture school founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1922, where she began exploring weaving after facing restrictions in other disciplines due to gender biases at the institution.
Susan Weil is an American artist best known for her experimental three-dimensional paintings, which combine figurative illustration with explorations of movement and space.
John Andrew Rice Jr. was the founder and first rector of Black Mountain College, located near Asheville, North Carolina. During his time there, he introduced many unique methods of education which had not been implemented in any other experimental institution, attracting many important artists as contributing lecturers and mentors, including John Cage, Robert Creeley, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Franz Kline. During World War II, he made it a haven for refugee European artists, including Josef Albers and Anni Albers, who arrived from the Bauhaus in Germany. Later, Black Mountain College became the platform for the work of Buckminster Fuller, who made the college the site of the first geodesic dome. Because of his strong ideas and unusual educational philosophy, Rice became involved in many debates in the socially conservative 1930s, '40s and '50s, becoming known as a very outspoken critic of the standard model of higher education in the United States.
Karen Karnes was an American ceramist, best known for her salt glazed, earth-toned stoneware ceramics.
Ruth Aiko Asawa was an American modernist artist known primarily for her abstract looped-wire sculptures inspired by natural and organic forms. In addition to her three-dimensional work, Asawa created an extensive body of works on paper, including abstract and figurative drawings and prints influenced by nature, particularly flowers and plants, and her immediate surroundings.
Mary Caroline Richards was an American poet, potter, and writer best known for her book Centering: in Pottery, Poetry and the Person. Educated at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and at the University of California at Berkeley, she taught English at the Central Washington College of Education and the University of Chicago, but in 1945 became a faculty member of the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina where she continued to teach until the end of the summer session in 1951.
Trude Guermonprez, was a German-born American textile artist, designer and educator, known for her tapestry landscapes. Her Bauhaus-influenced disciplined abstraction for hand woven textiles greatly contributed to the American craft and fiber art movements of the 1950s, 60s and even into the 70s, particularly during her tenure at the California College of Arts and Crafts.
Helen Anne Molesworth is an American curator of contemporary art based in Los Angeles. From 2014 to 2018, she was the Chief Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles.
Lorrain Helen Goulet was an American sculptor and painter, known primarily for her direct carving of stone and wood, and for works which often celebrate women, families and cultures.
The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC) is an exhibition and performance space and resource center located at 120 College Street on Pack Square Park in downtown Asheville, North Carolina dedicated to preserving and continuing the legacy of educational and artistic innovations of Black Mountain College (BMC). BMCM+AC achieves its mission through collection, conservation, and educational activities including exhibitions, publications and public programs.
Hazel Frieda Archer was a twentieth-century American female photographer who attended and then taught at Black Mountain College. Her images and prints captured life at Black Mountain, and her art theory and teaching influenced major 20th-century artists and personalities.
Joseph Fiore (1925–2008) was an American painter. He was involved with Black Mountain College from 1946–1957, first as a student and later as a member of the faculty.
Oli Sihvonen was a post-World War II American artist known for hard-edge abstract paintings. Sihvonen's style was greatly influenced by Josef Albers who taught him color theory and Bauhaus aesthetics at Black Mountain College in the 1940s. Sihvonen was also influenced by Russian Constructivism, Piet Mondrian, and Pierre Matisse. His work has been linked to Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Hard-Edge and Op-Art.
↑ Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (September 14, 2023). "ReVIEWING 14 Abstracts + Presenter Bios". Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Retrieved December 5, 2023. see abstract, "Thomas E. Frank: The Landlord: W. D. Weatherford and the Early Years of Black Mountain College"
↑ Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (January 6, 2022). "Black Mountain College: Idea + Place". Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. 1940s: A Place of Their Own. Retrieved December 5, 2023.
↑ Creative, The Uprising. "The Longest Ride". Nicholas Sparks. Archived from the original on October 29, 2017. Retrieved October 21, 2017.
↑ Vaughan, David. Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years. Melissa Harris, ed. Aperture, 1972? Page 15ff. Cunningham and Cage met at the Cornish School. "[Cunningham] remembers Miss Cornish saying that there were no grades, no schedules, ‘and I thought, if there’s a school like this in Seattle, imagine what there must be in New York. But I quickly found there was nothing like it there—in fact, the only other school I have found that offered the same kind of open experience was Black Mountain.’”
Bibliography
Bennis, Warren & Biederman, Patricia Ward (1997). "Experiment at Black Mountain". Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration. Addison Wesley. pp.142–170. ISBN0-201-57051-3.
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (2008). Shape of Imagination: Women of Black Mountain College. Asheville, NC. ISBN978-0977413812.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Molesworth, Helen (2016). Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957. Institute of Contemporary Art in Association with the Yale University Press. ISBN978-0-300-21191-7.
Rumaker, Michael (c. 2003). Black Mountain Days. Black Mountain Press. ISBN0-9649020-8-7.
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