Black Mountain College's Hidden History

Black Mountain College was, by the standards of nineteen-thirties America, an almost impossibly countercultural institution. No tenure. No grades that mattered for transfer. No separation between intellectual and manual labor. Faculty and students ate together, farmed together, built furniture together, and argued about art and democracy at the same table. The college attracted people who did not fit comfortably within conventional educational structures, and for twenty-four years it held them.

The community that formed there included people whose personal lives were as unconventional as the institution. Josef Albers was, by the account of art historians and scholars who have studied his papers and letters, gay. His marriage to Anni Albers appears to have been a partnership of profound mutual respect and professional collaboration, a relationship both of them protected fiercely and wrote about directly. The fuller texture of his inner life at Black Mountain is harder to recover. The letters and journals are held at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation; the public record holds names, but the texture is harder to access than the institutional history.

Charles Olson, the poet who led the college in its final years, ran a community that included openly or semi-openly gay and bisexual writers and artists at a period when homosexuality was a federal criminal offense and could result in imprisonment. That community existed partly because Black Mountain was remote, partly because it was outside conventional institutional structures, and partly because Olson appears to have created a space that tolerated nonconformity more broadly.

The college closed in nineteen fifty-seven. No formal archive of the community's social life was preserved in the way its artistic output was. What we know is that people who could not have lived openly elsewhere found, for some years, a mountain in North Carolina where they could.