Why Are We Still Talking About Black Mountain College? (Published 2022)

Among the most enduring and evocative images of Black Mountain College — the experimental liberal arts school in rural North Carolina that was founded during the depths of the Great Depression, and that fostered the talents of numerous artists during the uniquely hopeful and propulsive period that followed World War II — are several photographs of R. Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller, the eccentric inventor and designer, attempting to construct his first large-scale geodesic dome. It was the summer of 1948, and Fuller, who was a faculty member in residence at the school — along with the likes of Willem and Elaine de Kooning, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Peter Grippe, Beaumont Newhall and Richard Lippold — had brought with him rolls of aluminum Venetian-blind scrap stock and enlisted students and faculty to help him build.

In one of the photographs, which were taken by Newhall, Fuller and his students survey the slats they have laid out on the grass. In another, Fuller stands, plans in hand, alongside Elaine de Kooning and Josef Albers, then head of the Black Mountain art program — all three of them dressed in casual summer clothes, looks of intense contemplation on their faces. In the end, the material was neither sufficiently strong nor tensile enough for the structure to remain erect (it was jokingly called “the Supine Dome”), but its collapse is beside the point. The photos are symbolic of what, at root, Black Mountain was about: a group of working artists merging art and life, study and play, and countenancing failure, as the art historian Eva Díaz has written, “as part of a dynamic process of educational risk.”

Like ancient Athens, the Bloomsbury Group in London, the Harlem Renaissance, Vienna during the heyday of Mozart or Freud and 19th-century Concord, Mass., Black Mountain College was the site of a genius cluster, though in the unlikeliest of places: at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Swannanoa Valley, 15 miles east of Asheville and near the small town for which the school was named. There, from 1933 to 1957, a ragtag group of teachers — helmed variously by an irreverent classics professor, John Andrew Rice; physics professor Theodore Dreier; chemistry professor Frederick Georgia; former Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers (who arrived in 1933 with his wife, the textile artist Anni Albers); and, in the 1950s, the poet Charles Olson — offered students a liberal arts education with art at its core. “Art is a province in which one finds all the problems of life reflected,” Josef Albers wrote in 1934, in the Black Mountain College Bulletin.

It was, in fact, the college’s summer sessions in the arts — and the impressive lineup of visiting faculty who came to teach at them — that would solidify its mythical reputation. Among the many well-known names who have cameos in Black Mountain’s history are the painters Jacob Lawrence, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Leo Amino and Ben Shahn; the photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind; the art critic Clement Greenberg, the social critic Paul Goodman and the literary critic Alfred Kazin; the composer Stefan Wolpe; the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius; the poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Hilda Morley (who, along with Olson were part of a group of writers known as the Black Mountain Poets); the Bauhaus potter Marguerite Wildenhain and the Japanese potter Shoji Hamada, who, in 1955, was designated a Living National Treasure of Japan. Plenty of students, too, would become famous artists in their own right: Ruth Asawa, Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Weil, Cy Twombly, Francine du Plessix Gray, Robert De Niro Sr., Arthur Penn and John Wieners among them.