Black Mountain College - History

An experimental college in the USA founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and others. Originally located south of the village of Black Mountain, near Ashville, NC, the college sought to educate the ‘whole’ student through a combination of study, communal living, and manual work. An appreciation of the arts was central to its unorthodox curriculum. In 1933 the artist Josef Albers and his wife, both former Bauhaus teachers, joined the faculty and the college became a centre for the Bauhaus movement. The college relocated to its own campus at Lake Eden in 1941 where it remained until its closure in 1957.

Black Mountain College, founded in 1933 near Asheville, North Carolina, was known as one of the leading progressive schools in the United States. 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.

History

Founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier and other former faculty of Rollins College, Black Mountain was experimental by nature and committed to an interdisciplinary approach, attracting a faculty which included many of America's leading visual artists, poets, and designers.

Operating in a relatively isolated rural location with little budget, Black Mountain College inculcated an informal and collaborative spirit, and over its lifetime attracted a venerable roster of instructors.

Not a haphazardly conceived venture, Black Mountain College was a consciously directed liberal arts school that grew out of the progressive education movement. Black Mountain proved to be an important precursor to and prototype for many of the alternative colleges of today ranging from the University of California, Santa Cruz to Hampshire College and Evergreen State College, among others.

Black Mountain College officially ceased operations in 1956; the property was later purchased and converted to an ecumenical Christian boys' residential summer camp, which later became a long-time location of the Black Mountain Festival and the Lake Eden Arts Festival.

Among the notable alumni of Black Mountain College are Fielding Dawson, Michael Rumaker, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Weil, John Chamberlain, Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland, Oli Sivhonen, Joel Oppenheimer, Jonathan Williams, Ruth Asawa, Robert De Niro, Sr., Cy Twombly, Basil King, and Kenneth Snelson.

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.