Discover and Celebrate the Bliss of Black Mountain College in Mountains of Western North Carolina
" Every moment there seemed alive in a way that few have since. This had to do with being asked to be fully awake, to be at a new threshold of perception, whether in class, in the work program, in our own work, or in the life of the community...It let us perceive how much we, each of us, had meaning in the process of the life of the community. That was our education"
Fully Awake:Black Mountain College is a documentary film about the experimental college based in North Carolina from 1933 to 1957, and how its progressive pedagogy influenced many of America's most important twentieth-century artists.
A brief overview from Wikipedia:
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...." CLICK HERE for additional information, including links to famous faculty and alumni
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1964 Summer Institute faculty at Black Mountain College Photo courtesy of North Carolina Division of Archives and History
"... currently known as Camp Rockmont for Boys, is located three miles from Black Mountain. Six hundred acres, a portion of the original tract, is primarily meadowlands of the Great Craggy Mountains, which is divided by a creek that feeds Lake Eden. The site was first developed in the early 1920s by E. W. Grove as an amusement center and included four summer lodges, a round stone house, a dining hall and two stone cottages. When the resort business dwindled, Black Mountain College purchased the property in 1937. Founded earlier in 1933 at the Blue Ridge Assembly, the college was established at its new site by 1941. The experimental Black Mountain College was internationally known for its modernist advancements in American art and education. The college faculty and students were leaders of the day and included architect A. Lawrence Kocher; composer John Cage; Bauhaus artist and professor Josef Albers; artists Willem and Elaine De Kooning, and Franz Kline; and poet Charles Olson.
"The campus was enlarged with the construction of new buildings designed and built by the faculty and students, most notably the Studies Building, built in 1941 by Kocher. Initially, Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius was commissioned to design the building; however, the cost estimate far exceeded the college's budget. College President John Rice asked Kocher to design a more economical building. After consultation with Gropius, he planned a four-part facility that could be built in stages; only the first section was completed. Other buildings constructed for
the college include the Jalowetz Cottage, Minimum House and Cabin 24/25,
which are a notable collection of International Style architecture.
Additionally, the faculty and students designed and built the farm buildings
and Quiet House. After the outbreak of World War II, most of the male
students and faculty left the campus, resulting in financial struggles
and a change in the emphasis of study from visual to literary arts.
By the 1950s, Black Mountain College, like many other experimental American
institutions, struggled to exist. In 1957, the campus was sold to Camp
Rockmont for Boys..".
The following memoir was delivered on the occasion of the opening of a Black Mountain College exhibition, curated by Mary Emma Harris, at Bard College in 1987,
"Some felt that it was here that leadership skills could be developed. Some say manual labor as a leveler, rather like chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. There were those who thought it exploitation to ask people paying for an education to wear themselves out hauling coal.
"We had graduate architectural students sent to us to get practical experience in building. We did build several buildings designed by faculty and students. We did have a farm which supplied meat, milk, vegetables. We did help with maintenance chores, worked in a print shop. There was a woodworking shop where we built furnishings, lab equipment, utensils for parties and small houses for pigs.
We worked closely with local professionals, carpenters, a farmer planter. Maintenance genius. Taught us – saved us from being too theoretical or even too self-satisfied.
"The Bauhaus is credited with including crafts in their perception of the artist. Albers in our classes asked us to look at what man had made. Not selectively or chronologically but widely. We looked at pottery designs, bridges, tools, buildings. Paintings. At how things went together, at how things grow. It was exciting. He asked us to figure out what made each idea work. He asked us to look and look but in looking to trust and use our perceptions creatively (and neatly).
"It isn’t a great jump to become fascinated by how each job we do – be it being a farmer, a woodworker or musician or machine operator – calls for the same scrutiny, the same excitement in finding how all these skills (or needs) may be used to make one’s own contribution, perhaps even in a new way.
"It is one thing to have a glimpse of the possibilities, but it is another to be in a place where this insight may be tried and even used. But best, all-needed.
"It is tremendously exciting to be in an environment where you are called to use all of your faculties in every direction, to be for a moment the true Renaissance man. Creator, theorist, administrator, experimenter, student, teacher, laborer. To be in an institution that is willing to be totally responsible for what it believes and what it does...." CLICK HERE to read ALL of her memoir
"The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning." Alfred North Whitehead The Aims of Education, l929
Who Helped Make
Black Mountain College
So Great?
John Rice, Founder & Classics Scholar
Josef Albers, Painter
Charles Olson, Writer
John Cage, Composer
Buckminster Fuller, Architect
Merce Cunningham, Dancer & Choreographer
Robert Creeley, Poet
Jacob Lawrence, Painter
Willem de Kooning, Painter
Franz Kline, Painter
Robert Rauschenberg, Painter
M.C. Richards, Potter & Poet
Walter Gropius Architect, Bauhaus founder
Explore the the Geniuses Once Associated with Black Mountain College As Faculty or Alumi
Rauschenberg:
Art and Life
With 230 illustrations, 112 in full color, Rauschenberg: Art and Life is a richly impressive and highly readable portrait of the artist. Showing the astonishing dexterity and range of Rauschenberg's art even as an emerging artist; the creation of his now famous combines; his eagerness to bridge art and technology; and the establishment of ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange), this is a book, as one reviewer put it, "to grab from a burning house."
Robert Rauschenberg
Poetic and lush, Robert Rauschenberg's Combines present layers of complex and sometimes conflicting information. This approach, first explored by Rauschenberg in the early 1950s, proved prescient and has become increasingly relevant in the current age of cascading information, when even the most ground-breaking artists are referencing and sampling disparate elements to create new forms.
The Combines suggest the fragility of definitions, the fluidity of materials, and the complexity of forms that are characteristic of Rauschenberg's works. The artist's handling of materials provides a precise physical evolutionary link between the painterly qualities of Abstract Expressionism and iconographical, subject-driven early Pop Art. This book focuses on the works created roughly between 1954 and 1964, the most important decade in the artist's 50-year career,
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning arrived in the United States in 1926 as a 22-year-old stowaway from Holland--soon to become a leading figure in the emergence of Abstract Expressionist painting in New York. This volume presents over 100 illustrations from each phase of de Kooning's career, and describes the personal and art historical background behind his work and its critical reception. Sally Yard, author of Willem de Kooning:
The First Twenty-Six Years in New York, details the progress of de Kooning's career, from his brief stint as a WPA painter, to his first one-person exhibition of abstract work in 1948. Five years later, his series of women rendered in aggressive, lashing gestures stunned contemporaries, not only for their vehemence but for their supposed reversal in direction from "pure" abstraction to figuration.
Franz Kline
Using interviews and correspondence with dozens of Kline's friends and critics, and quoting from the artist's own letters, the author has created an evocative portrait of Kline's evolution from an ambitious art student in Boston and London to a penniless Greenwich Village artist painting murals in bars just to pay the rent, and finally to a mature artist in command of his own unique and hard-won style.
Kline made his initial, admittedly modest, reputation as a figurative artist, and rare photographs of that early work--sketches from life-drawing class, portraits of Nijinsky, scenes of the Pennsylvania countryside--offer an intriguing background for his later paintings. Not until his late thirties did Kline begin to develop an abstract mode, working his way through a series of strikingly dissimilar styles.
John Cage
Although John Cage has been almost universally recognised as the leading figure of the post-war musical avant-garde, this is the first book to present a complete and coherent picture of Cage the composer. Providing a historical account of Cage's musical concerns and changing style, James Pritchett describes just what it was Cage did and why and how he did it. The book is centred around extensive descriptions of the most important works and compositional techniques, including in-depth explanations of the role of chance and indeterminacy in Cage's music.
Merce Cunningham and the Modernizing of Modern Dance is a complete study of the life and work of this seminal choreographer/dancer. More than just a biography, Copeland explores Cunningham's life story against a backdrop of an entire century of developments in American art.
Copeland traces his own experience of Cunningham's dances-from the turbulent late '60s through the experimental works of the '80s and '90s-showing how Cunningham moved dance away from the highly emotional, subjective work of Martha Graham to a return to a new kind of classicism. This book places Cunningham in the forefront of an artistic revolution, a revolution that has its parallels in music (John Cage, and the minimalist composers who followed him), painting (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg), theater (the "happenings" of the '60s), and dance itself (the Judson School of dancers).
Buckminster Fuller's Universe
If you've never read any of Bucky's books, this would be a great place to start. It summarizes alot of his ideas in the context of his life story. Many of his books are very difficult to read due to his very unique style of communication, but this one puts most of his thoughts into more standard literary form...without losing the gist of his ideas. Start here, and if you get intrigued move on to 'Critical Path'. If you make it through that and are still interested, there's plenty more!
The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into BeautySoetsu Yanagi's writings and works compiled by Bernard Leach "...Many examples of Yanagi's writings have been pulled together along with
photographs of actual objects in order to give the reader a small feel
for the philosophy that Yanagi and others hammered out starting around
the 1920's...."
Click on each of the dozens of categories to the left to uncover what makes the Asheville area so vital, so intriguing and so, well, UTTERLY BLISSFUL!
Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place
A film by Henry Ferrini & Ken Riaf
7:00 p.m., Thursday, April 17, 2008 Fine Arts Theatre, 38 Biltmore Ave., Downtown Asheville
Admission: $7 BMCM+AC members + students with ID / $9 non-members
Filmmaker Henry Ferrini will be in town for the screening and will answer questions afterward.
"A beautifully composed homage to one of the few truly monumental American poets of our times." Jack Hirschman, Poet Laureate of San Francisco
“The best film about an American poet ever made.” Bill Corbett, The Boston Phoenix
"...an impressionistic, yet informative and moving document about the act of creation that neither shies away nor oversimplifies." Michael Kelleher, ArtVoice'
Polis Is This combines interviews, archival footage, commentary and animation into a single voice full of insight and visual beauty. The film allows the audience access to the subject even as it captures the zeitgeist of a formative era in literary history. The 60-minute documentary features John Malkovich, as well as interviews with poets and scholars Robert Creeley, Ed Sanders, Diane di Prima, Gerrit Lansing, John Sinclair, Pete Seeger, Chuck Stein, Anne Waldman, Charles Boer, Susan Thackrey, Amiri Baraka, Robin Blaser, Michael Rumaker, Jonathan Williams, Ammiel Alcalay, John Stilgoe, Vincent Ferrini and the poet’s son, Charles Peter Olson. An eclectic soundtrack puts together Boston’s grandfather of punk rock Willie “Loco” Alexander with Black Mountain College avant-garde composer Stephan Wolpe along with a little banjo picking from Pete Seeger. The film has screened to enthusiastic audiences in New York, Cambridge and San Francisco.
Polis Is This: Director’s statement
All my life I’ve heard about Charles Olson. As a child around the holiday dinner table I’d listen to tales of a giant who walked the midnight streets of Gloucester, Massachusetts. In school, poets and writers asked if I was related to the Ferrini in The Maximus Poems.
Back home in Gloucester, I’d crack the 600 plus page Maximus Poems to learn a little something about myself and my place in this place. I wondered why Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Stan Brakhage, Diane di Prima, and Amiri Baraka made pilgrimage to Olson’s $29-a-month flat. What was it about this postman’s son, a Harvard trained historian, and the power of his imagination, that made a generation of poets and artists see him as “the big fire source.”
How and why America’s first fishing town became the portal to Olson’s world became a mystery to solve. The poet’s methodology, one that he borrowed from the Greeks, became my investigative technique as well. Istorin means to find out for oneself. It is the root of our word history and it became the route that I followed.
In 1995, during the first Charles Olson Festival held in Gloucester, writer Ken Riaf and I put shoulder to oar and set out to find out what all the fuss was about. We talked to professors in the academy and people on the street. We searched in university archives and found Olson’s friends and family. In Polis Is This I’ve focused decades of filmmaking experience to address an even longer held question about our relationship to the place that contains us.
Henry Ferrini, Gloucester
January 25, 2007
Selected Poems
Charles Olson (1910-1970) was one of the most important American poets of the 20th Century. In this volume, Olson friend Robert Creeley has chosen most of the poems that I would have chosen for such a volume. He has included such works as "An Ode on Nativity" and "The Twist" which help celebrate the city of his birth and youth, Worcester MA.
Creeley fairly evenly divides the book between choosing from The Collected Poems and The Maximus Poems. The only poem that is not in this excellent volume that I would have included is "Ferrini 1," Olson's tribute to his brilliant friend, Vincent Ferrini. Buy this book!
Famous Potters Teach Seminar at Black Mountain College
Despite the fact that Black Mountain College could rarely offer faculty more than room and board, a number of important teachers and artists were drawn to the school as part of the regular faculty or to participate in the school's Summer Institute. Here is an example:
Above is a portion of a brochure promoting a pottery seminar:
Pottery Seminar: Easter Center for Interchange of Work & Ideas: East to West October 15-29, 1952 $100.
Marguerite Wildenhain, potter and teacher, Weimar Bauhaus ;
Bernard Leach, potter and author, Cornwall, England;
Shoji Hamada, "The Japanese Potter";
Soetsu Yanagi, Director, Imperial Folk Museum, Tokyo and founder of the folk art movement (mingei).
In conjuction with an Institute in the Crafts September 22 to November 15, 1952
Discussions and Lectures, Development of Form Ideas, Design for Mass Production, Craft in the Machine World, Master & Apprentice in the Workshohp, in the College, Relation of Craft to Art. Demonstrations by Leach, Hamada, Wildenhain
Wildenhain "...studied at the Weimar Bauhaus for about five years... designed the prototypes for elegant, mass-produced dinnerware, most
notably the Halle tea set and the Burg-Giebichenstein dinner service... held brief positions at the Oakland School of Arts and Crafts, the Appalachian Institute of Arts and Crafts, and Black Mountain College.... In the early 1940s, she settled permanently at Pond Farm, an artists' colony founded by architect Gordon Herr and his wife Jane Herr, about seventy-five miles north of San Francisco.... published three books (Pottery: Form and Expression; The Invisible Core: A Potter's Life and Thoughts; and That We Look and See: An Admirer Looks at the Indians),..."
Bernard Leach "... spent his young adult years in Japan ... befriended a young potter named Shoji Hamada. With Hamada, he set up the Leach Pottery at St. Ives, Cornwall in 1920, including the construction of a traditional Japanese wood burning kiln. The two of them promoted pottery as a combination of Western and Eastern arts and philosophies.... Publishing A Potter's Book in 1940 defined Leach's craft philosophy and techniques, and became his breakthrough to recognition... Leach advocated making utilitarian, so-called ethical pots over fine art pots, which promote aesthetic concerns rather than function. Thus, his style had a lot of influence on counter-culture and modern design in North America during the 1950s and 1960s. .... His American apprentices include Warren MacKenzie... Leach was instrumental in organizing the first and only International Conference of Potters and Weavers in July 1952 at Dartington Hall, where he had been working and teaching. It included exhibitions of British pottery and textiles since 1920, Mexican folk art, and works by conference participants, among them Shoji Hamada and US-based Bauhaus master potter Marguerite Wildenhain. Another important contributor was Japanese aesthetician Soetsu Yanagi, author of The Unknown Craftsman. According to Brent Johnson, "The most important outcome of the conference was that it helped organize the modern studio pottery movement by giving a voice to the people who became its leaders…it gave them [Leach, Hamada and Yanagi] celebrity status…[while] Marguerite Wildenhain emerged from Dartinghall Hall as the most important craft potter in America... ."
Shoji Hamada "...He studied ceramics at Tokyo Institute of Technology under Kawai Kanijiro, soon after he met Bernard Leach with whom he travelled to England in 1920. In 1955 the Japanese government designated him a "Living National Treasure". Shoji Hamada was, without doubt, the most influential studio potter of the twentieth century. Having spent three years in St Ives with Bernard Leach he returned to Japan in 1923... Throughout a lifetime dedicated to making pottery he achieved international recognition and his works have been collected by most of the world’s greatest museums. Hamada was unique in that his immense influence was felt not only in his native Japan, particularly in Mashiko, but also in the West. In the United Kingdom and the USA his style and philosophy became legendary and he was revered as the archetypal ’Oriental’ potter. In 1955 he was designated as an important cultural Property or, as it is more commonly known ‘Living National Treasure...." See alsoMingeikan's writeup
1968 Wheel Throwing Demo by Shoji Hamada:
Below is a promo for a 50 minute film which offers an examination of the art of pottery through the work of two world renowned potters — Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada The actual film traces the entire process of pottery-making, beginning with the digging of clay and its
preparation, and on through to long sequences of pots being thrown on the wheel.
Yanagi Soetsu "... philosopher and founder of the mingei (folk art) movement in Japan in the late 1920s and 1930s. Yanagi rescued lowly pots used by commoners in the Edo and Meiji period that were disappearing in rapidly urbanizing Japan. In 1936, Japanese Folk Crafts Museum was established..."
Discover the Bliss of
Black Mountain College: It's Teachers and Alumni
The Arts at Black Mountain College
Launched in the depths of the Depression, Black Mountain College had fewer than 1300 pupils over its 24-year lifespan. Yet this haven of experimentation in the North Carolina hills counted among its students and faculty Franz Kline, Walter Gropius, Josef Albers, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert De Niro, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham and Willem de Kooning, among others.
Based on some 300 interviews as well as primary sources, this revealing study by an art historian traces the school's evolution from a small, innovative liberal arts college with a general curriculum to a creative community of practicing artists. Despite bitter internal conflicts and a certain insularity, Black Mountain risked constant financial worries to maintain a democratic openness and willingness to "let things happen." This attractively illustrated chronicle documents the gamut of creativity, from painting to weaving, ceramics, dance, graphic arts and photography.
Remembering Black Mountain College
This book is a unique document of a Black Mountain College reunion held in 1995. All former students were invited to decorate a 18 X 24 panel with work that reflected themselves or their Black Mountain College experience. A hundred and ten responded, and the catalogue reproduces all their contributions. The variety, richness, humor, and profundity of their voices are amazing.
Josef Albers
Many people may not know that Josef Albers played a large part in revolutionizing teaching art in the 20th Century. Many people do not know how many 2oth century artists lives were in some way affected by his teaching--either directly or indirectly.
It is surprising that it has taken this long for a book on the remarkable teaching career of Josef Albers to appear, but here it finally is.
Fred Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz do a superb job of bringing the pedagogical thinking of perhaps the greatest 20th century art educator to life as well giving us a clear picture of the teacher himself. If this is the only book you ever read on teaching art you will give yourself the greatest gift possible.
The Art of Fannie Hillsmith
Fannie Hillsmith was personally picked out by Josef Albers to replace him as a 1945 summer teacher at Black Mountain College, where she taught alongside Lyonel Feininger and Ossip Zadkine and was succeeded by Robert Motherwell. Inspired principally by Klee and Cubism, she exhibited frequently and successfully with the American Abstract Artists as one of its most notable female members.
Hazel Larsen Archer
The book features photographer Hazel Larsen Archer (1921-2001). Archer arrived at Black Mountain College in 1944 as a student, and later was the photography teacher from 1949-53. Her photographs are stunning and are an intimate document to the history of Black Mountain College. Includes photographs of Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Ray Johnson and other students and teachers of this unique college.
The photographs offer a unique and personal glimpse into life at Black Mountain College. Ninety-two breath-taking photographs which will enrich the viewer's understanding of Black Mountain College. Of all the photographers at Black Mountain College - Callahan, Siskind, Beaumont Newhall - Archer offers the most in-depth, intimate and revealing glimpse into the essence of the BMC experience. These photographs show the human side of icons who have now become legendary.
Gregory Masurovsky
Gregory Masurovsky attended Black Mountain College as an impressionable teenager. Thus began his lifelong commitment to progressive graphic art. He and his late wife, the abstract painter Shirley Goldfarb, decided on their first visit to Paris to remain permanently. They encountered intellectual and artistic luminaries like de Beauvoir, Giacometti, and Sartre, and rising art stars like David Hockney, who painted a significant double portrait of them.
The closest of their artistic and intellectual associations was with Michel Butor, a legendary French critic and philosopher. This BMC monograph features a rare gathering of important new texts, reflecting the collaboration that has always characterized Butor's work with Masurovsky.
Michael Rumaker
Michael Rumaker was a writing student at Black Mountain College during the final traumatic years of the college. From a blue-collar background, his personal poverty paralleled that of the school. Teachers like Charles Olson and Robert Creeley helped him to a good start in gritty published stories and longer fiction, and he later produced important chronicles of the American gay experience.
"As a poet who also has lost a child, and written about it, I have great admiration for the courage, grace, and voice of memory/experience that Saul Bennett shares in this moving, redemptive collection. What makes the book stand out is the Lieberman-like use of diction, adding another layer of tension with respect to the subject matter. This is as strong a debut as any poet has made into the world of letters."
Joseph Fiore
As both student and teacher, artist Joseph Fiore had one of the longest personal associations with Black Mountain College, where he experienced both the discipline and liberation of modern painting at the hands of regular professors such as Ilya Bolotowsky, Charles Olson, and Josef Albers, as well as significant visitors like Jacob Lawrence, John Cage, and Willem de Kooning.
