Black Mountain College was an experimental liberal arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina . The school operated from 1933 to 1957. It was led by a group of established architects, artists, educators, intellectuals, poets, writers, and others. Black Mountain College became renowned for its art program and its innovative approach to education.
Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 by the American scholar John Andrew Rice. Rice was deeply influenced by the American philosopher and educator John Dewey’s ideas about progressive education . The college opened with about 20 students in September 1933, and, though enrollment fluctuated throughout the college’s 24 years, the maximum was about 100. The college offered a wide range of liberal arts classes, but art, drama, and music were at the center of the school’s academic program. All students were strongly encouraged to take courses in drawing and classics—that is, the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. In addition, students as well as faculty helped with the school’s operations. This involved doing farm work, kitchen duty, and construction work, including designing and constructing some of the buildings on campus.
Among Black Mountain’s first faculty were the artist Josef Albers and his wife, Anni, a weaver, from Germany’s famed Bauhaus , an influential school of design. The Bauhaus closed in 1933, at the time of the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany. Josef Albers’s teaching methods later helped to modernize art education in the United States.
During its brief existence, Black Mountain also counted among its faculty such well-known figures as the composer John Cage ; the architect Walter Gropius ; the poets Robert Creeley , Robert Duncan , and Charles Olson ; the choreographer Merce Cunningham ; the mathematician Max Dehn; the inventor Buckminster Fuller ; the scientist Natasha Goldowski; the writers Paul Goodman, Alfred Kazin, and Mary Caroline (M.C.) Richards; the painters Ilya Bolotowsky, Willem De Kooning , Franz Kline , Jacob Lawrence , and Robert Motherwell ; the photo historian Beaumont Newhall; and many others. Olson taught Creeley, Duncan, and other young writers who became leading poets of their time. They were among a group of progressive American poets who came to be known as the Black Mountain poets . Olson was the college’s last rector (head).
In 1949, Josef and Anni Albers and other longtime faculty members left Black Mountain College, wearied by ongoing ideological conflicts. Though several good years followed, the college began to decline. By the mid-1950’s, most of the students and faculty had departed. Facing declining enrollment and with no clear solution to its mounting financial troubles, Black Mountain College closed its doors in 1957.
Today, the legacy of Black Mountain College is kept alive through the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, North Carolina. The museum was founded in 1993 to preserve the college’s history as well as to celebrate its impact on the modern and contemporary arts. The museum hosts a permanent collection, special exhibitions, public programs, and other historical activities related to Black Mountain College. The museum’s website at http://www.blackmountaincollege.org offers additional information about the college.
