CategoriesStyles and Movements
Black Mountain College
Experimental college in North Carolina, open from 1933 to 1957, where teaching, making art and communal living were combined.
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About
Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice and fellow teachers who wanted a faculty-run school with the arts at its centre. Within months Josef and Anni Albers arrived from Germany, where the Bauhaus had just closed, and Josef's classes on colour, materials and close observation became the college's backbone.
Its summer sessions drew an extraordinary mix. Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell taught painting, and Buckminster Fuller first tried to raise a large geodesic dome there in 1948. Ruth Asawa studied with Albers from 1946 and developed her looped-wire sculptures in those years. In 1952 John Cage staged an untitled event combining music, dance, poetry, film and Robert Rauschenberg's white paintings, often cited as the first Happening. Merce Cunningham formed his dance company there in 1953. Under the poet Charles Olson the college leaned increasingly towards writing before it closed in 1957.
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