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The Short Life and Long Legacy of Black Mountain College

By Holland Cotter

• Dec. 17, 2015

BOSTON — In school I had issues with structure. I wanted to study everything that involved words and images, which meant literature, art, language, philosophy, psychology and religion, among other subjects. Declaring a major was like self-censorship. The ivory tower felt tight. Street politics, travel and transcendental substances were all in my curriculum. What I was after was education as an open category, an end in itself, an adventure that “aimed at being something instead of at getting something.”

Those words were written by the painter Josef Albers who, in the early 1930s, helped create a model for just such an adventure at Black Mountain College near Asheville, N.C. There, for 23 years, a small, shifting group of teachers and students maintained an economically precarious and richly productive experiment in learning-as-life. And when the experiment ended — cash and energy ran out — the memory of it as an ideal lived on, waxing mythic with time. It’s that memory, and myth, that’s distilled in “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957” at the Institute of Contemporary Art here, one of the season’s most atmospheric historical shows.

Black Mountain was born of rebellion. In 1933, a classics professor named John Andrew Rice was fired from a college in Florida for seditious teaching: He called a common chisel an art object and dismissed public debates as “a pernicious form of intellectual perversion.” When he left, a few of his like-minded colleagues left with him. They rented a building outside Asheville and started their own school.

In line with the era’s progressive educational thinking — John Dewey was God — the school was conceived as pro-community and anti-hierarchy: Everybody learned from everybody. Although the faculty was technically in charge, students were involved in institutional decision-making. It was also left to them to decide when they were ready to graduate. (Most never did.) There were no course requirements, departmental restrictions, grades or degrees. The school offered, at least initially, a fairly broad-based liberal arts program, with art itself, modernist in mood, at the center, available to all, not necessarily as a professional pursuit but as a means of unlocking creative thinking in students in every field.

Given this emphasis, the choice of art teachers was all-important. And Rice had the luck of securing Albers and his wife, Anni Albers , an artist who specialized in weaving, for the job. Closely associated with the Bauhaus in Germany, which had closed under Nazi pressure in 1933, they had recently arrived as refugees in the United States, and were relieved to be here. “Our world goes to pieces,” Anni Albers would write in her notebooks. “We have to rebuild our world.”

They brought finely honed skills as teachers and makers with them, and examples of work they produced at Black Mountain fills the first gallery. There are superb examples of Anni Albers’s monumental, abstract weavings, with their loamy colors and sunlight shimmer, but also gouache drawings that look like unraveling lengths of thread. The surprise is Josef Albers. Anyone who identifies him exclusively with his later color studies will find an unexpectedly varied artist here: a photographer of Aztec ruins (the Alberses adored Mexico, making more than a dozen trips), a furniture designer, a carver of bouncy curlicue-patterned woodcuts, and a collagist who could infuse the lift of devotional art into an arrangement of dried leaves.

Josef Albers assigned collage-making to his students as an exercise to attune the eye to the expressive character of found materials, and to train the hand in disciplined improvisation. If there was a Black Mountain aesthetic in the early years, it might be in this effort to find glamour in the ordinary and grace in the rough and plain. You can read such a sensibility in exquisite collages by Ruth Asawa and Trude Guermonprez ; in the abstract photographs of Josef Breitenbach ; in a detail-crazed tapestry of a painting by the future mail-artist Ray Johnson ; and in a line of regal jewelry assembled by Anni Albers and Alexander Reed from bobby pins, paper clips and wine corks.

The Alberses were a huge part of the Black Mountain story, but still only a part. Word of the college spread to New York and San Francisco, and established artists, taking summers off from the city, arrived. Robert Motherwell did a little teaching. Franz Kline hung out. In 1948, Willem de Kooning painted one of his great early all-over abstractions here titled “Asheville.” And Elaine de Kooning embraced the whole scene, making art, acting in plays and pitching in on construction of R. Buckminster Fuller’s first (and unraisable) geodesic dome on campus.

Elaine de Kooning appears in some of the show’s photographs, and there are many. In an isolated and self-fascinated community, everyone seemed to be photographing, or drawing, or painting everyone else. Hazel Larsen Archer , a student turned teacher, was the school’s unofficial photo-documentarian, and she was really good. She took wonderful images of Robert Rauschenberg, himself an irrepressible photographer , dancing. She repeatedly shot Merce Cunningham in action, and his partner, John Cage, in looming, moist-browed close-up.

Music and dance were integral to the Black Mountain program and accounted for some of the most precocious cultural contributions. But with their particular spatial and temporal requirements, they also formed a world of their own. And that’s a bit how they’re presented, in a gallery equipped with a grand piano and dance stage for live performances. Separate, too, is material from the school’s final years when, led by the writer Charles Olson , it gained a reputation as a poetry center, with Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and, very briefly, Allen Ginsberg, in residence.

By the time Ginsberg got there in 1957, the school was in fatal decline. It was dead broke, almost empty of students, and the air was tainted with rancor. The place had always been a battleground for individual egos and partisan groups. The politics could get nasty. In 1940, Rice was pushed out, under a cloud of scandal. Nine years later, the Alberses left in righteous dismay, feeling the school had deserted its values, become commercialized. Olson remained a factious presence to the end.

Little hint of this dystopian side to the Black Mountain experiment comes through in the exhibition or its sumptuous catalog. For that you must turn to Martin Duberman’s “Black Mountain College: An Exploration in Community.” First published in 1972, it serves as a kind of reality check to the myth.

It examines how tensions among the school’s personnel influenced important decisions. It considers the sociopolitical context of the Southern setting, with an ever-present buzz of racism that spilled over into the institution. The book emphasizes that, despite the starry names now attached to Black Mountain, most of its students and many teachers went on to ordinary and now-obscure futures. That fact jibes with the Alberses’ vision for the school as a place where people could come to learn how to make art and how to live, not how to make careers and gain fame.

Black Mountain art is the one thing that Mr. Duberman makes little mention of — what it looked like, why it was conceived, how it was created, what it meant, what was done with it. And art, of course, is exactly the focus of the Boston show, painstakingly researched by Helen Molesworth , the Institute of Contemporary Art’s former chief curator, and Ruth Erickson, an assistant curator there. (Ms. Molesworth is now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.) This show offers more than 200 works, painted, drawn, sculpted, printed, pasted, woven, molded, written, spoken, danced and sung; cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary, to some degree multicultural, a whole, unstructured world of wonderful stuff, some of it major — de Kooning’s “Asheville,” Cunningham performing “Changeling,” a 1958 film — and much of it ephemeral, and in a commercial sense, minor.

“Wholeness is not a Utopian dream,” Anni Albers wrote at Black Mountain. “It is something that we once possessed and now seem largely to have lost, or to say it less pessimistically, seem to have lost were it not for our inner sense of direction which still reminds us that something is wrong here because we know of something that is right.”

Whatever its faults — and art schools today can learn from this — Black Mountain grasped the dream of art as a lived condition rather than a hoarded possession.

“Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957” continues through Jan. 24 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 100 Northern Avenue, Boston; 617-478-3100, icaboston­.org.

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC) was founded in 1993 to honor and pay tribute to the spirit and history of Black Mountain College and to acknowledge the College's role as a forerunner in progressive, interdisciplinary education with a focus on the arts. Emphasizing the individual rather than the institution, the College had striking success in producing creative people of great talent and originality. Black Mountain College left both a remarkable legacy in the arts and an important educational model. Through exhibitions, publications, lectures, seminars, films and oral history interviews, BMCM+AC is committed to spreading awareness about Black Mountain College. In addition to our programming, other ongoing projects include oral history interviews with BMC alumni and the development of a permanent collection.

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First comprehensive U.S. museum exhibition on legendary Black Mountain College premieres at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston on Oct. 10

This October, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens the first comprehensive U.S. museum exhibition on Black Mountain College (BMC), a small, experimental school in North Carolina whose influence on art practice and pedagogy still has profound impact today. Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 focuses on how, despite its brief existence, Black Mountain College became a seminal meeting place for many of the artists, musicians, poets, and thinkers who would become leading practitioners of the postwar period. Figures such as Anni and Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ruth Asawa, Robert Motherwell, Gwendolyn and Jacob Lawrence, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley taught and studied at the college, among many others.

The exhibition features 261 objects by nearly 100 artists, archival materials, and, true to the interdisciplinary nature of the school, a grand piano and dance floor for live, in-gallery performances. Organized by Helen Molesworth, the ICA’s former Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Assistant Curator Ruth Erickson, Leap Before You Look will be on view from Oct. 10, 2015 to Jan. 24, 2016. Following its ICA debut, the exhibition will travel to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California (Feb. 21–May 14, 2016) and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (Sept. 17, 2016–Jan. 1, 2017.)

“We are extremely proud to present Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957 , a comprehensive examination of Black Mountain College, whose radical art, artists, and ideas have had a lasting impact on the art of our time,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “The most ambitious curatorial project ever undertaken by the ICA, the exhibition and performances pose an expansive vision of the arts and creativity—one that matches the ICA’s interdisciplinary artistic program and our view of the centrality of the arts in education.”

“Black Mountain College is an important historical precedent for thinking about relationships between art, pedagogy, democracy, and globalism,” said Molesworth. “ Leap Before You Look examines the college’s critical role in shaping many major movements, and ideas in postwar art and education, including assemblage, contemporary dance and music, the New American Poetry, and the American studio craft movement—influences that can still be seen and felt today.” The exhibition follows a gentle chronology, organizing the material in thematic sections, allowing each gallery to elucidate various aspects of BMC’s practice, pedagogy, and philosophy.

An introductory gallery offers background into the origins of Black Mountain College, founded in 1933 by John Rice. Influenced by the utopian ideals of the progressive education movement, BMC placed the arts at the center of a liberal arts education and believed that in doing so it could better educate citizens for participation in a democratic society. A 1952 college bulletin stated: “Our central and consistent effort is to teach method, not content; to emphasize process, to invite the student to the realization that the way of handling facts and himself amid the facts is more important than the facts themselves.”

The exhibition subsequently focuses on Anni and Josef Albers. Josef Albers was hired from the Bauhaus in Nazi-era Germany to become BMC’s first art faculty. Given the centrality of his pedagogy, and Anni’s writing and weaving, to the BMC experience , this room is dedicated to their work, including prints, paintings, photographs, and weavings made by the Alberses during their tenure at the college from 1933 to 1949. One highlight is the many trips the Alberses took to Mexico while they were at BMC and the impact these visits had on their work and teaching. Included are Anni Albers’s Monte Alban (1936), a large-scale weaving in which the strict geometry of the grid is combined with the wandering outline of Zapotec architecture, and Josef Albers’s Tenayuca (1943), an abstract painting inspired by the stairways and platforms of the eponymous Aztec pyramid.

Viewers are introduced to BMC pedagogies, which all shared the ideal of “learning through doing.” The exhibition contains work and photographs from Josef Albers’s courses in design, drawing, color, and material studies. Also exhibited are the collaborative work of students and teachers, such as jewelry made by student Alexander Reed with Anni Albers using every day materials such as corks, paper clips, and bobby pins. Models and studies for Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic sphere, first erected at BMC, are included alongside an examination of the role architectural building played at the college. These didactic tools exemplified the college’s mission to teach through hands-on experimentation.

Black Mountain College was a cosmopolitan gathering place for artists from Europe, Asia, and the United States, making it a place where a wide variety of ideas and artistic practices converged. The exhibition explores the concept of cosmopolitanism as a framework for understanding the unique position of BMC as a conduit between European and American avant-gardes which profoundly shaped the development of postwar artistic practice, teaching, and identity. Works by European artists such as Xanti Schawinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Josef Breitenbach are presented alongside paintings by a younger generation of American artists including Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Gwendolyn and Jacob Lawrence, and Franz Kline.

While there is no such thing as a Black Mountain aesthetic, the exhibition puts forward the idea that BMC generated a rich field of art, craft, and performance with a shared interest in the tactility of materials, the process of making, and the bodily engagement of the maker. Profoundly interdisciplinary, BMC gave rise to one of the 20th-century’s most legendary artistic collaborations: that of Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg. The exhibition features a sprung dance floor for live dance performances (see performance section below); a grand piano that will be “prepared” according Cage’s specifications; and a freestanding set decoration by Rauschenberg titled Minutiae (originally 1957).

The final gallery focuses on the college in the 1950s, a period when poetry and pottery took on especially significant roles at BMC. In his influential essay “Projective Verse,” the poet Charles Olson (the final BMC rector from 1951 to 1957) reimagines poetry as a field of action, emphasizing the use of the entire page and the importance of breath. These ideas became a catalyst for a generation of young American poets, many of whom Olson invited to teach at BMC, including Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. This gallery examines the college’s critical role in the development of experimental literature in the United States. At the same time, the BMC pottery shop was formed and a series of influential ceramic artists taught at BMC, including Robert Turner, Karen Karnes, and Peter Voulkos. Many of those involved with pottery at BMC would lead the modern studio pottery movement in the United States.

Leap Before You Look Performance Program

Merce Cunningham and Katherine Litz dance performances Leap Before You Look includes a 20 x 20 foot sprung dance floor to accommodate weekly, in-gallery performances. The ICA is working with the Merce Cunningham Trust and Silas Reiner, a former Cunningham dancer, to restage selected early Cunningham dances accompanied by live music. Students from the Boston Conservatory and Harvard University will work with Reiner to prepare performances and demonstrations to take place in the gallery. The ICA is also working with choreographer and performer Pauline Motley to perform BMC dance teacher Katherine Litz’s Glyph dance.

John Cage performances Leap Before You Look also includes a grand piano. For a limited period of time during the exhibition, the piano will be “prepared,” using a method developed by Cage through which the piano (and its sound) is altered by the addition of screws, erasers, and other pieces of hardware to the strings, dampers, and/or hammers. The process of preparing the piano will be open to the public, so that visitors can see how it is done and engage in conversation with the preparator.

Concert by intercontemporain November 15, 2015 Between 1949 and 1954, composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage exchanged a series of letters in which they discussed compositional practices and the current culture. Members of the French ensemble intercontemporain, founded by Boulez, will perform a selection of works by Cage and Boulez composed during this epistolary period and also read excerpts from the letters themselves.

Re-staging of John Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1 The ICA has invited artist Kelly Nipper; artist Jonathan Calm; poet Damon Krukowski; musician Tim McCormack; and Boston Poet Laureate Danielle Legros Georges to reimagine John Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1, the first “happening” and one of the most oft-cited events in BMC history. Theater Piece No. 1 was arranged according to a simple “score” that allotted each performer a set duration of time in which to perform an activity. The five aforementioned practitioners will each propose a series of actions to take place over the course of the exhibition (whose dates will serve as the “score”) that together constitute a reimagining of Theater Piece No. 1. This project re-animates the first happening by inviting contemporary artists to respond to its history and to consider its legacy in dialogue with contemporary art, practice, and culture.

Soundscape Music was a central part of the BMC curriculum and experience. The ICA has developed a soundscape, organized by John Andress, ICA Associate Director of Performing Arts, to accompany the exhibition and assure that music is part of the gallery experience. This soundscape consists of four playlists drawn from the BMC repertoire (music taught and performed at the college) that will be played through the gallery space. Among the composers included are Bach, Beethoven, Pierre Boulez, Miles Davis, and John Cage.

Catalogue Leap Before You Look is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, 400-page catalogue published by the ICA in association with Yale University Press. The catalogue includes an essay by Molesworth focusing on the interrelated themes of art pedagogy, progressive education, democracy, and cosmopolitanism. Molesworth has invited contributions from more than 20 scholars, both senior and junior, who possess specialized knowledge of a variety of topics from the history of weaving and ceramics to modernist music and American poetry. The catalogue’s diversity of voices mirrors the mixture of objects in the exhibition and the spirit of BMC. Authors include Harry Cooper, Eva Diaz, Steve Evans, Jennifer Gross, Jonathan Hiam, Katherine Markoski, Nancy Perloff, Jeffrey Saletnik, Alice Sebrell, Jenni Sorkin, Gloria Sutton, and many others.

Image: Anni Albers, Knot 2, 1947, gouache on paper, 17 x 21 ⅛ inches. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ Artists Rights Society New York. Photo: Tim Nighswander/ Imaging 4 Art

Media Preview Press are invited to view the exhibition on Tuesday, Oct. 13 at 9:30 a.m. RSVP to Kate Shamon at [email protected] .

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Day Trip: Black Mountain

Just 13 minutes from Old Fort lies Black Mountain, an idyllic small town with a very big art scene. Black Mountain’s history of creative expression began at Black Mountain College, an experimental liberal arts college on the forefront of the avant-garde movement. While no longer open, the college laid the groundwork for today’s art schools, museums, galleries, musical performances, and festivals.

An Eye for the Arts

Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center

Welcoming over 200,000 visitors annually, the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center should be at the top of your list of places to see. Explore over 4,000 pieces of artwork, many derived from the center’s collaboration with local artists and organizations.

Their main event is the {Re}HAPPENING at Lake Eden, the site of the original Black Mountain College. Every April, organizers host a one-day dinner and performance event that allows contemporary artists to share the legacy of the school through installations, new media, music, and performance projects. Look for details at Black Mountain College .

Black Mountain Center for the Arts

Established in 2000, the Black Mountain Center for the Arts (BMCA) brings stimulating gallery exhibits, concerts, theater, and special events to both residents and visitors. BMCA also offers numerous classes for those interested in visual arts, music, dance, and theater. Their mission is to “bring arts to the people and people to the arts.”

BMCA’s Upper Gallery features vibrant and diverse exhibitions with free admission. The works of local and regional artists, including group and solo shows that celebrate student artwork, are on display. .

BMCA’s premiere happening is Art in Bloom, now in its 17th year. This series of events includes a Regional Artists Gallery Exhibit and the floral arrangements they inspire. Take a tour of local gardens to be inspired by the art. Click here for more information.

Swannanoa Valley Museum

Swannanoa Valley Museum is situated in Black Mountain’s former 1921 fire house, designed by Richard Sharpe Smith who was the supervising architect of the Biltmore Estate. The first-floor gallery is dedicated to one major temporary exhibit each year. Currently it is displaying the history of Beacon Blankets with historic spools, robes, and blankets. Its second floor permanent exhibit space explores the area’s fascinating general history.

The Old Depot Gallery

The Old Depot Gallery, housed in the historic 100-year-old Black Mountain Train Depot, exhibits master crafts and works of fine arts. The Old Depot Gallery Association protects and maintains the depot while supporting the teaching of mountain and heritage crafts in local schools. Once a year, they host Art by the Tracks, a bi-annual juried art show that raises funds to continue their projects.

In Addition…

Continue your journey and purchase art at the plentiful art galleries and showrooms around the town. A few we like are Red House Studio and Gallery, Seven Sisters Gallery, and Flood Gallery Fine Arts Center.

Festivals and Live Music

Some of the most famous festivals and concert events in the country occur in Black Mountain. Check out these favorites.

Sourwood Festival

The Sourwood Festival, named for the pure, raw honey from the NC Appalachian Mountains, has everything you’re looking for and then some. Live music and dancing, arts and crafts, children’s rides, and hundreds of vendors provide a whole day of family fun. Scheduled for the 2nd week in August, the festival celebrates its famous honey with ongoing tastings and bee demonstrations. Admission is free.

Leaf Festival

The annual LEAF (Lake Eden Arts Festival) was created in 1995 to build community and connect cultures through world music and the arts. The next LEAF is slated for October on the site of the historic Black Mountain College. The festival features 6 stages showcasing a wide variety of musical genres, including Bluegrass, Appalachian, Haitian, Techno, Americana, and dozens more.

Explore different world cultures through culinary tents, dance, healing arts, an African drum circle, and slam poetry and puppetry. Family fun also includes games, water sports, ziplining, a Foamy Homies experience, and the Jelly Dome, an interactive art installation. And there is so much more!

LEAF attracts more than 12,000 participants over a 3-day weekend. Many people camp out or rent onsite lodging to make the most of their time. Proceeds benefit LEAF’s mission to empower youth across the globe as agents of positive change.

White Horse Black Mountain

The White Horse is a unique concert and event venue hosting world-class live music. Some of the performances include the Irish Music Circle, Celtic music, acoustic blues, orchestras, and Open Mic. For a full list of upcoming concerts, follow this link .

Where To Eat

It won’t be easy to decide where to dine amongst so many wonderful options. Here are a few of our favorites.

When you see a line wrapped around the block, you’ll know you found Open Oven Brunch and Bakery . We love their fresh omelets and avocado toast! Ask to be seated at their new rooftop bar.

Refuel after your exciting day with burgers and brews at Trailhead Restaurant & Bar . Expect to meet a lot of hikers and locals soaking in the relaxed yet lively atmosphere. You’ll find excellent prices and portion sizes.

If you’re searching for fine dining without all the fuss, look no further than Que Sera for world-class food. They serve an outstanding selection of seafood options, including an oyster bar. They are also well known for their authentic Southern dishes, such as Blackened North Carolina Redfish with Jumbo Lump Crabmeat. Reservations are highly recommended.

Immerse yourself in kitschy German culture at Berliner Kindl . Open for lunch and dinner, they serve up the best schnitzels, bratwursts, knackwurst, and Reubens with sides of potato salad, sauerkraut, and red cabbage. Reservations for dinner are recommended.

Blue Ridge Day Trip: Biltmore Blooms

Spring is the time to see the blooms at one of Western North Carolina’s top attractions — the Biltmore Blooms celebrati…

Blue Ridge Day Trip: Grandfather Mountain

Grandfather Mountain — part natural history attraction and part N.C. state park — protects one of the most biodiverse a…

Blue Ridge Day Trip: Chimney Rock State Park

Find that top-of-the-world feeling at the summit of Chimney Rock, a 535-million-year-old monolith with views of Lake Lu…

Blue Ridge Day Trip: The Cradle of Forestry

Did you know that the American study of forestry was born right here in the Blue Ridge Mountains? Visit the site of the…

Tour of BMC Campus

ReViewing Black Mountain College 5: Shaping Craft + Design was a great success last weekend! Thank you to everyone who made the conference possible! We had a wonderful time Sunday, October 13. We met at the museum in the morning for a wonderful brunch with coffee and breakfast breads provided by Green Sage. Later, we carpooled out to Black Mountain to see where all the magic that was Black Mountain College began. Here are some pictures from the tour!

We hope everyone who joined us had as much fun as we did!

On The Site

Black Mountain College: A Progressive Education

February 21, 2016 | yalepress | Art & Architecture

What you do with what you know is the important thing. To know is not enough. —John Rice

There were no letter grades at Black Mountain College, nor were there required courses, set curricula, standard examinations, or prescribed teaching methods. The responsibility of education resided with the students, who advanced from the junior to senior division and ultimately graduated by completing, as the first college catalogue described, “comprehensive tests of [a student’s] failure or success in meeting responsibility.” These individually tailored exams, which students undertook only when they felt prepared to do so (meaning that very few students ever graduated from Black Mountain), posed a series of diverse questions: “What did you learn from our studies with fall leaves?” “What do you think should be done about the Negro problem in the United States?” “Suppose that your task was to design a piano cover, what factors would you have to consider?” “What do you think we will laugh at in twenty years from now that we take very seriously today?” Such questions sought to test not students’ knowledge base but their critical, creative, and responsive acumen—that is, their ability to construct a color study, discuss political rights, and arrange plants in a garden with equanimity and self-reflection.

When John Rice established Black Mountain College in 1933, he sought to create a school that dissolved distinctions between curricular and extracurricular activities, that conceived of education and life as deeply intertwined, and that placed the arts at the center rather than at the margins of learning. Study at the college thus consisted of traditional liberal arts subjects—literature, biology, mathematics, foreign language, drama, music, the visual arts, and so forth—as well as participation in the college’s functional operations and community. For Rice, education was registered not by grades or other standard criteria but in a heightened desire to learn and to question, which would lead students to an expanded aptitude for solving a range of problems and to a richer sense of self. The college’s only examinations signal these priorities, testing students’ capacity to engage imaginatively with the issues—philosophical, social, and practical—confronted in contemporary life. At Black Mountain, Rice told the writer Louis Adamic, “our central and consistent effort is to teach method, not content; to emphasize process, not results; to invite the students to the realization that the way of handling facts and himself amid the facts is more important than facts themselves.”

Rice’s boyhood education at the Webb School in Buck Bell, Tennessee, informed his vision. That school’s founder, John Webb, first modeled the pedagogy that Rice would come to praise and emulate. As Rice recalled in his autobiography, Webb’s “mind was fertile with ways for bringing boys to knowledge. . . . His pupils acquired respect for their own capacity, for he made each of them an artist for the moment, with his own private goal.” Employing a Socratic method—posing questions and encouraging students to discover their own paths to answers—rather than conveying information directly, Webb inspired Rice’s approach as a teacher. This formation not only inclined Rice to uphold the ideals of progressive education but also instilled in him skepticism of the soft intellectualism that befell many progressive initiatives. “When I bore the dubious title of educator and at last was tagged with the still more dubious ‘Progressive,’” Rice recalls, “I visited schools and listened to breathless accounts of the latest things. I could match them point by point from the Webb School I knew as a student and go them one better—two better, for the school had both order and intellectual backbone.”

By the 1930s, John Dewey’s proposals for progressive education, promoting experimental and innovative learning through self-directed experiences in and outside the classroom, led to the blossoming of numerous institutions. Indeed, Rice first met Dewey in 1931, when Dewey came to Rollins College to chair the Conference on Curriculum for the College of Liberal Arts, a meeting that brought together representatives from many liberal arts colleges that had emerged in the 1920s and 1930s to enact models of progressive education. These included Sarah Lawrence (opened in 1926), Antioch (reorganized in 1921), and Bennington (opened in 1931 by progressive educator William Kilpatrick). Dewey had argued since the late 1890s that schools served an essential social function by cultivating freethinking and well-informed individuals who would fully participate in democratic society. In Democracy and Education, he wrote, “The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth.” Through Dewey, Rice discovered a means of linking his convictions about pedagogy with his commitment to democracy, and at Black Mountain Dewey found an example of his educational philosophy in practice.

Dewey visited Black Mountain multiple times, ultimately joining the board of advisers and donating hundreds of books to the college library. While he never spoke in detail about the college, Dewey understood it to be deeply intertwined with democracy. In a letter to Rice following his first visit in 1935, Dewey wrote, “No matter how the present crisis comes out, the need for the kind of work the College does is imperative in the long-run interests of democracy. The College exists at the very ‘grass roots’ of a democratic way of life.” Like other progressive schools of higher education, Black Mountain College offered a more horizontal model of governance, empowering faculty instead of trustees to lead the school and involving the entire school community in discussions about major decisions. Furthermore, teaching staff, their families, and students shared housing, so that, as the first college catalogue explained, “the relation is not so much of teacher to student as of one member of the community to another.”

What most distinguished Black Mountain from other schools was the vital role that the arts played in the college’s democratic aims. Both Rice and Dewey valued the creative and emotional aspects of human development and believed that art—or the “art experience”—was essential for nurturing an individual’s capacity to participate in a democracy. The arts, according to Rice, are “least subject to direction from without and yet have within them a severe discipline of their own.” An art experience, as Dewey outlined in Art as Experience (1934), was about discovering and respecting the integrity of one’s materials. Black Mountain College literature echoed this sentiment: “Through some kind of art experience, which is not necessarily the same as self-expression, the student can come to the realization of order in the world; and, by being sensitized to movement, form, sound, and the other media of the arts, gets a firmer control of himself and his environment than is possible through purely intellectual effort.” The theory is that the process of making art hones not only observation but also judgment and action, so that students who acquire intelligence through art both notice what is happening around them and develop individual responses to it. In Rice’s words, “The artist thinks about what he himself is going to do, does it himself, and then reflects upon the thing that he himself has done.” By encouraging both self-reflection and the translation of thought into action, pedagogy at Black Mountain began with art to end with democracy.

Ruth Erickson is associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

All images courtesy of the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.

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Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957

• Feb 21 – May 15, 2016 This is a past exhibition
• Image Gallery

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The first comprehensive museum exhibition in the United States about the experimental liberal arts college where influential artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Josef and Anni Albers, and Merce Cunningham studied and taught.

“We do not always create ‘works of art,’ but rather experiments; it is not our intention to fill museums: we are gathering experience.”  –Josef Albers 

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957  is the first comprehensive museum exhibition in the United States to examine the history of Black Mountain College (BMC). Founded in 1933 in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, this renowned experimental college placed the arts at the center of a liberal arts education in an effort to better educate citizens for participation in a democratic society. Profoundly interdisciplinary with an emphasis on inquiry, discussion, and experimentation, it gave equal attention to the visual arts—painting, sculpture, drawing—and so-called applied arts or crafts like weaving, pottery, and jewelry-making, as well as architecture, poetry, music, and dance.

Influenced by the teaching of philosopher John Dewey and the ideals of the progressive education movement, there were no required courses and free inquiry and learning by doing were encouraged. Students often developed cross-disciplinary independent studies and all members of the college were responsible for its day-to-day operation, including maintenance, farm work, and kitchen duty. Numerous influential artists, poets, musicians, and performers either taught or were students there. This utopian experiment came to an end in 1957, but not before it created the conditions for some of the twentieth century’s most fertile ideas, having an enormous impact on American postwar cultural life. Black Mountain College became a dynamic crossroads for refugees from Europe— several of whom were Jewish and fleeing persecution, including Josef and Anni Albers who were brought to BMC in 1936 from the Bauhaus in Germany—and an emerging generation of American artists. Their education was unlike anything else in the United States, rooted in a belief in art and its capacity to expand one’s internal horizons, and in art as a way of living and being in the world. 

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957  focuses on how, despite its brief existence, BMC became a seminal meeting place for many of the artists, musicians, poets, and thinkers who would become the principal practitioners of the postwar period. Teaching at the college combined the craft principles of Germany’s revolutionary Bauhaus school with interdisciplinary inquiry, discussion, and experimentation, forming the template for American art schools. The methods of teaching developed at the BMC—such as an emphasis on interpretation and dialogue in the form of the student critique (or “crit”)— are still present in many of our most advanced art schools; the language of interdisciplinarity began at BMC and the mixture of disciplines and mediums gave way to what is largely regarded as the first “happening”; and the aspirations of intentional communities, utopian ways of thinking, bridging the gap between art and life, and the creation of a counter-culture that are characteristic of American culture in the 1960s all flourished at the college in the preceding decades. While physically rooted in the rural South, BMC formed an unlikely cosmopolitan meeting place for American, European, Asian, and Latin American art, ideas, and individuals. The exhibition argues that BMC was as an important historical precedent for thinking about relationships between art, democracy, and globalism. It examines the college’s critical role shaping many major concepts, movements, and forms in postwar art and education, including assemblage, modern dance and music, and the American studio craft movement—influences that can still be seen and felt today.

The exhibition contains a rich and varied mixture of materials in the areas of painting, sculpture, weaving, and pottery. There are also documentary photographs and other archival ephemera, books printed on campus by BMC poets and sound works of readings, and a stage and piano for performances to take place regularly during the run of the exhibition. There were four main instructors at the college—Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, and Charles Olson—and the exhibition will show works by each, alongside works by their students and other faculty, including Anni, Ruth Asawa, Merce Cunningham, Robert Creeley, Jess, Ray Johnson, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Gwendolyn and Jacob Lawrence, Robert Rauschenberg, M.C. Richards, Cy Twombly, Peter Voulkos, and Susan Weil. For example, there are photographs of BMC students working to assemble the first geodesic dome with Fuller, as well as sculptures made in the spirit of Fuller’s experiments. There are scores by Cage; photographs of Cage and Cunningham’s performances; Ben Shahn’s cover art for Charles Olson’s chap books; Japanese ceramic vessels of Shoji Hamada; and early sculptures by John Chamberlain, to name only a few of the objects included.

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957  is organized by The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and curated by Helen Molesworth, chief curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, with Ruth Erickson, assistant curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. The Hammer’s presentation is organized by Anne Ellegood, senior curator, with MacKenzie Stevens, curatorial assistant and January Parkos Arnall, curatorial assistant, Public Engagement. 

In-Gallery Performances

Friday–Sunday, March 18, 19, and 20 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. each day

Former Cunningham dancer  Silas Riener  performs the newly reconstructed work  Changeling , an early Merce Cunningham solo choreographed using chance procedures, to Christian Wolff’s score for prepared piano,  Suite . Dancer and choreographer  Polly Motley  performs  Glyph , a whimsical work choreographed by dancer and teacher Katherine Litz at Black Mountain College in 1951, to Lou Harrison’s score  The Glyph . Pianist Aron Kallay and percussionist Yuri Inoo. 

Friday–Sunday, April 15, 16, and 17 Friday–Sunday, April 22, 23*, and 24  12 p.m. and 2 p.m. each day (*12 p.m. and 1 p.m.)

Former Cunningham dancer  Silas Riener  performs the newly reconstructed work  Changeling , an early Merce Cunningham solo choreographed using chance procedures, to Christian Wolff’s score for prepared piano,  Suite . Dancers from  L.A. Dance Project  will perform excerpts from  Springweather and People  (1955),  Suite for Five  (1956),  Changeling  (1957), and other early work by Merce Cunningham. Music by Christian Wolff and John Cage is performed by pianist  Aron Kallay . 

The Hammer Museum's presentation of Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957  is made possible by a gift from the Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund. Major support is provided by Susan and Larry Marx.

Generous funding is also provided by The Broad Art Foundation, Wasserman Foundation, Margo Leavin, and Chara Schreyer. Support for related programming is provided by Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Barbara Timmer.

Leap Before You Look has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Celebrating 50 Years of Excellence. 

Major support is provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation.

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

• Sunday Feb 21, 2016 2:00 PM This is a past program

• Wednesday Feb 24, 2016 12:30 PM This is a past program

• Wednesday Mar 2, 2016 12:30 PM This is a past program

• Wednesday Mar 9, 2016 7:30 PM This is a past program

• Thursday Mar 10, 2016 7:30 PM This is a past program

• Tuesday Mar 15, 2016 7:30 PM This is a past program

• Thursday Mar 17, 2016 6:30 PM This is a past program

• Thursday Mar 17, 2016 7:30 PM This is a past program

• Friday Mar 18, 2016 12:00 PM This is a past program
• Friday Mar 18, 2016 2:00 PM This is a past program
• Saturday Mar 19, 2016 12:00 PM This is a past program
• Saturday Mar 19, 2016 2:00 PM This is a past program
• Sunday Mar 20, 2016 12:00 PM This is a past program
• Sunday Mar 20, 2016 2:00 PM This is a past program

• Saturday Mar 19, 2016 5:30 PM This is a past program
• Tuesday Mar 22, 2016 7:30 PM This is a past program

• Thursday Mar 24, 2016 6:30 PM This is a past program

• Thursday Mar 24, 2016 7:30 PM This is a past program

• Tuesday Mar 29, 2016 7:30 PM This is a past program

• Wednesday Mar 30, 2016 6:30 PM This is a past program

• Wednesday Mar 30, 2016 7:30 PM This is a past program

• Thursday Mar 31, 2016 1:15 PM – 2:45 PM This is a past program

• Thursday Mar 31, 2016 7:30 PM This is a past program

• Sunday Apr 10, 2016 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM This is a past program

• Tuesday Apr 12, 2016 7:30 PM This is a past program

• Wednesday Apr 13, 2016 7:30 PM This is a past program

• Thursday Apr 14, 2016 7:30 PM This is a past program
• Friday Apr 15, 2016 12:00 PM This is a past program
• Friday Apr 15, 2016 2:00 PM This is a past program
• Saturday Apr 16, 2016 12:00 PM This is a past program
• Saturday Apr 16, 2016 2:00 PM This is a past program
• Sunday Apr 17, 2016 12:00 PM This is a past program
• Sunday Apr 17, 2016 2:00 PM This is a past program
• Sunday Apr 17, 2016 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM This is a past program

• Tuesday Apr 19, 2016 7:30 PM This is a past program
• Friday Apr 22, 2016 12:00 PM This is a past program
• Friday Apr 22, 2016 2:00 PM This is a past program
• Saturday Apr 23, 2016 12:00 PM This is a past program
• Saturday Apr 23, 2016 1:00 PM This is a past program
• Sunday Apr 24, 2016 12:00 PM This is a past program
• Sunday Apr 24, 2016 2:00 PM This is a past program
• Saturday Apr 23, 2016 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM This is a past program
• Sunday May 1, 2016 2:00 PM This is a past program
• Wednesday May 11, 2016 12:30 PM – 12:45 PM This is a past program

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ReVIEWING Black Mountain College

Call for papers and proposals. All disciplines invited!  

ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 15

October 25-27, 2024 in Asheville, North Carolina An annual conference exploring the history and legacy of Black Mountain College  

Hosted and sponsored by Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC) and The University of North Carolina Asheville

Thematic Focus: Black Mountain College / Living with the Land  

Keynote Speaker: David Silver ,professor of environmental studies and urban agriculture at the University of San Francisco and author of the forthcoming book The Farm at Black Mountain College co-published by Atelier Éditions and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

Co-hosted by BMC Museum + Arts Center and UNC Asheville, this three-day program, open to the public, celebrates the opening of the museum’s exhibition The Farm at Black Mountain College , curated by David Silver and Bruce Johansen. Originally started by students, the farm at BMC developed into a dynamic experiment in community building and self-sufficiency. Viewing the college through the lens of the farm reveals new perspectives into campus life as well as the Work, Building, and Art Programs, creating conditions for work in craft, drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, and writing.

Proposals connected to the BMC farm, land, and work program are welcome, but the theme Black Mountain College / Living with the Land can also apply to many other disciplines and practices related to BMC, including environmental sustainability, education, visual arts, poetry, architecture, indigenous history, and more. Additionally, proposals on any theme related to Black Mountain College and its legacy are encouraged and will be considered , and, in the spirit of BMC, the conference challenges disciplinary boundaries, and invites contributions of all genres: performances, panels, multi-media proposals, and workshops are welcome.

The conference fee is $85 and includes lunch on Saturday and a 1-year membership to the museum.

The fee for current members is $45. Members of the UNCA community do not pay a fee.

Submission deadline: July 24, 2024

Notification will be made by August 7, 2024

Submissions (single paper or panel session proposal): https://forms.gle/PbwcukPPt2uFVAZRA

Submissions (workshop or performance proposal): https://forms.gle/vxzEjYxqM21bZ14u6

Questions: [email protected]

https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/reviewing/