Black Mountain College

Black Mountain College. American art educational establishment at Black Mountain, North Carolina, founded in 1933 by a group of progressive academics led by John Andrew Rice (1888–1968) and closed in 1957 after long-standing financial problems. It was owned and administered by the teaching staff, with no outside control, and was kept deliberately small (with an average of about 50 students a year) to reduce administration; a variety of arts were taught and interaction between them was encouraged. Mary Emma Harris, a leading historian of the college, has written of it: ‘At Black Mountain learning and experience were to be closely bound, and emotional maturity and the ability to think were to be as much the goal of education as the assimilation of information and ideas … As it took shape, the college became a unique combination of liberal arts school, summer camp, farm school, pioneer village, refugee centre and religious retreat … Crucial to the founders' vision was that the college remain open to new ideas in a truly experimental spirit: the community changed from year to year, driven by the ideas and personalities of its faculty and students … For the twenty-four years of its existence, the college played a significant role in the reinterpretation and assimilation of European modernist thought into American culture, and it was … a catalyst for the emergence of the American avant-garde after the Second World War’ (chapter on Black Mountain College in the catalogue of the exhibition ‘American Art in the 20th Century', Royal Academy, London, 1993).

In the visual arts, the teacher most associated with Black Mountain College was Josef Albers, who arrived there with his wife Anni (who taught weaving) soon after it opened and stayed until 1949. Mary Emma Harris writes that ‘At Black Mountain he adapted the curriculum of the Bauhaus to general education, emphasizing the education of the students' visual perception and basic skills in drawing, colour theory and design concepts. He challenged the American idealization of, and subservience to, the cultures of Europe and Classical Greece, and instead turned the attention of his students to their own culture—to advertisements, to architecture and engineering, to the natural world and to New World cultures.’ Other illustrious figures who taught at Black Mountain include Robert Motherwell and the composer John Cage, whose ideas on chance and indeterminacy in the arts were widely influential. In 1952 he organized there a partly programmed performance (involving paintings and readings) that has subsequently been designated as the first Happening. Famous former students of the college include John Chamberlain, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Rauschenberg.