ART CITIES: London-Black Mountain College, The Experimenters

The story of Black Mountain College begins in 1933 and comprises a fascinating chapter in the history of education and the arts. Conceived by John A. Rice, a scholar who left Rollins College in a storm of controversy, Black Mountain College was born out of a desire to create a new type of college based on John Dewey’s principles of progressive education. The events that precipitated the college’s founding occurred simultaneously with the rise of Adolf Hitler, the closing of the Bauhaus school in Germany, and escalating persecution of artists and intellectuals in Europe. Some of these refugees found their way to Black Mountain, either as students or faculty.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

One of the most influential abstract painters of the twentieth century, Josef Albers bridged European and American Modernism throughout his artistic career. Albers was a legendary teacher at the Bauhaus until 1933 when he and his wife Anni Albers emigrated to North Carolina, where they founded the art department at Black Mountain College. The exhibition “Black Mountain College: The Experimenters” continues and builds on these themes of close study and formal exploration of the exhibition “Josef Albers-Paintings Titled Variants” , bringing together works by a group of artists whose career trajectories developed around the renowned liberal arts school that in the 1930s and 1940s became, as the writer Amanda Fortini recounts, “the site of a genius cluster.”⁴The presentation features work by a group of artists who overlapped at Black Mountain in the mid- to late 1940s as well as figures who studied with and befriended members of this group at other notable institutions during the same period. Known for her pioneering graphic wall hangings, weavings, and designs, Anni Albers is regarded as one of the most important abstract artists of the twentieth century. Also a distinguished alumna and Bauhaus instructor, Albers played an essential role during her time at Black Mountain College. She elaborated on the technical innovations she devised at the Bauhaus, developing a specialized curriculum that integrated weaving and industrial design. In addition, works on paper played a significant role in her practice, particularly after 1963 when she largely moved away from weaving to focus on printmaking. As in the present work, Albers often created designs from conglomerations of meandering or tangled lines that recall the intertwined threads of her weavings. Sue Fuller’s work testifies to the often-overlooked influence of craft traditions on the development of modernist abstraction. She created prints by pressing lace, fabric, and netting into the soft wax that coats the etching plate. Frustrated with the limitations of manufactured textiles, she experimented with stretching and ripping pieces of lace to create more unusual designs. Eventually, the etching became an unnecessary step in Fuller’s work and she began to focus purely on creating sculptures from woven and wound patterns of threads. Buckminster Fuller was a renowned American designer and philosopher known for his groundbreaking inventions. Some of his best-known inventions include the geodesic dome, the futuristic Dymaxion house, and the Montreal Biosphere. His ideas and work went on to influence many artists and designers, such as John Cage and Ruth Asawa. Conceived and designed in the late 1920s, the Dymaxion House was Fuller’s solution to the need for a mass-produced, affordable, easily transportable, and environmentally efficient house. The word “Dymaxion” was coined by Fuller through the combination of three of his favorite words: dynamic, maximum, and tension. Although never built, the Dymaxion’s design displayed forward-thinking and influential innovations in prefabrication and sustainability. The house was to be constructed from aluminum due to the material’s great strength, low weight, and minimum maintenance. Ruth Asawa is known for her extensive body of wire sculptures that challenge conventional notions of material and form through their emphasis on lightness and transparency. Asawa’s time at Black Mountain proved formative in her development as an artist, and she was particularly influenced by her teachers Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and the mathematician Max Dehn. Asawa began making her looped-wire sculptures in the late 1940s, while still a student at Black Mountain. During the summer of 1947, Asawa traveled to Toluca, Mexico, where she taught art to children and adults. It was over the course of this trip that local craftsmen showed her how to create baskets out of wire, teaching her the looping technique that she would at first clumsily replicate, but quickly learned how to use to create increasingly complex compositions.

Leo Amino’s plastic, wood, wire, and stone sculptures explore transparency and the dynamics of perception, articulating space, light, and color through geometric and biomorphic sculptural form. Born in Taiwan and educated in Tokyo, Amino immigrated to the United States as a young man in 1929 and settled in New York where he began developing his distinctive sculptural practice. Amino was invited by Josef Albers to join the faculty of Black Mountain in the summer of 1946, two years after the college’s integration, where he taught alongside the Alberses, Jacob Lawrence, and Walter Gropius. The artist’s experiments with plastics emerged from dissatisfaction with his attempts to incorporate color into traditional sculptural media, anticipating the concerns of minimalist artists that would not gain widespread attention until the 1960s. Amino dedicated the second half of his career exclusively to these ideas, producing a series of “refractional” compositions with light, color, and transparency. Amino deployed transparency in order to pose the question of the interdependency of subject and object through an optics of encounter, interpenetration, and absorption. Elaine de Kooning was a prominent American painter known for her skill as a portraitist. Her energetic figurative works provided an important perspective in the milieu of abstract expressionism. A student of Hunter College and the American Artists School, De Kooning gained prominence in the New York art scene early on in her career, eventually becoming a member of the Eighth Street Club. The elusive American artist Ray Johnson developed a conceptual practice that incorporated the concerns of Neo-Dada, Fluxus, and pop, while resisting classification within a single style. After leaving his hometown of Detroit in 1945, Johnson spent three years at Black Mountain in North Carolina, under the tutelage of Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Lyonel Feininger, and Robert Motherwell. Over the course of his five-decade career, much of Johnson’s tangible output took the form of collage. He referred to his early collages, made between 1954 and the early 1960s, as “moticos,” an anagram for the word “osmotic” which he chose out of a book at random. Sheila Hicks is one of the most significant fiber artists of the postwar period. Studying under Josef Albers at the Yale School of Art and Architecture in the early 1950s, Hicks began her lifelong interest in the interplay between color and materials. The fundamental idea of an artwork, and the transformative potential of its medium, is what remains paramount to Hicks. Color and scale become vital channels of communication, engendering complex tactile associations and emotive responses. This translation of formal quality to psychical effect manifests across compositions of varying size and spatial engagement.

Works by: Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Sue Fuller, Buckminster Fuller, Ruth Asawa, Leo Amino, Elaine de Kooning, Ray Johnson and Sheila Hicks

Photo: Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.350, Two Interlocking Forms with Fluted Edges), 1960s, Hanging sculpture—copper wire, 8 x 12 x 12 inches (20.3 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm), Courtesy David Zwirner Gallery

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 28/2-15/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/