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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. It launched 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 which continues to influence an alternative educational philosophy and practice.
History
Founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice and 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.
In a relatively isolated rural location, with little budget, and with an informal and collaborative spirit, the college was able to attract a legendary roster of instructors. Some of the innovations, relationships and unexpected connections formed at Black Mountain would have a lasting influence on the postwar American art scene. For instance, 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".
The Black Mountain College served as an early experiment which led to many of the alternative colleges of today, which have similar forms of progressive and faculty focused teaching, ranging from the University of California, Santa Cruz, to Hampshire College and Evergreen State College. It was a unique educational experiment for the artists and writers who conducted it. Not a haphazardly conceived venture, Black Mountain College was a consciously directed liberal arts school that grew out of the progressive education movement.
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, Susan Weil, John Chamberlain, Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland, 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.
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.External links
- Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
- The Black Mountain College Project
- A PBS documentary on Black Mountain College
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"Black Mountain College"