ART CITIES:Boston -Leap Before You Look
Black Mountain College (BMC) was an experimental school founded in 1933 on the principles of balancing academics, arts, and manual labor within a democratic, communal society to create “complete” people. The environment was so conducive to interdisciplinary work and experimentation that it proved to be one of the most important settings for 20th Century artists in their quest to revolutionize art.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston Archive
The exhibition “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957” focuses on how, despite its brief existence, BMC became a seminal meeting place for many of the artists, musicians, poets, and thinkers who would become the principal practitioners in their fields of the postwar period. The exhibition features individual works by more than 90 artists, student work, archival materials, a soundscape, as well as a piano and a dance floor for performances. John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier and other former faculty members of Rollins College in Florida founded Black Mountain College in 1933. Together, they sought to form a liberal arts college on theorist John Dewey’s principles of progressive education, that a student learned better through personal experience than through delivered knowledge. With this in mind, Rice created an environment that placed equal weight on academia, the arts, and manual labor in an egalitarian environment of extreme democracy. In this seemingly unstructured commune in the mountains of western North Carolina avant-garde creativity flourished. Rice recruited Josef Albers, formerly of the German Bauhaus School, to form the arts curriculum for the College. Albers incorporated the Bauhaus’ interdisciplinary approach to the arts, combining fine and decorative arts with craft, architecture, theater and music. During WW II many refugee-artists were attracted to Black Mountain College for its reputation as an experimental artistic environment. By the 1940s, the faculty included some of the greatest artists and thinkers of the time, including Walter Gropius, Anni and Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ruth Asawa, Robert Motherwell, Gwendolyn and Jacob Knight Lawrence, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley, Alfred Kazin and Paul Goodman. In 1952, John Cage staged his first “happening” at Black Mountain College. Fellow-classmates would continue to assist him with his performance art many years after leaving North Carolina. Robert Rauschenberg created Cage’s set, Merce Cunningham choreographed the movements, and Cage wrote the music. Through the interdisciplinary artistic practice and community values, the three artists created Performance Art. In 1951, poet Charles Olson returned to Black Mountain College to teach and became the dominant figure at the College until its closure. This utopian experiment came to an end in 1957, but not before it created the conditions for some of the 20th century’s most fertile ideas and most influential individual artists to emerge.
Info: Curator: Barbara Lee, Associate Curator: Ruth Erickson, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 100 Northern Ave, Boston, Duration: 10/10/15-24/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu-Fri 10:00-21:00, www.icaboston.org
