Black Mountain College, The Most Important School You Never Heard Of

In the autumn of nineteen thirty-three, a small group of dissident professors and their students arrived at a rented YMCA camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains near the town of Black Mountain, North Carolina, and opened a college organized around a radical premise: that art should sit at the center of a liberal education, not at the edges of it. The faculty in those early years included Josef Albers and his wife Anni, refugee weavers and color theorists who had been forced out of Germany when the Bauhaus school was shut down by the Nazis. They brought with them the Bauhaus conviction that making things, painting, weaving, building, composing, trained a kind of thinking that conventional lectures could not reach.

The college had no departments, no grades in any traditional sense, no fixed curriculum. Students ran the farm. Faculty washed dishes.

Power was shared at a single table. Over twenty-four years, from nineteen thirty-three to nineteen fifty-seven when it finally closed due to debts, Black Mountain produced a list of artists and thinkers out of all proportion to its size. Merce Cunningham and John Cage developed their collaborative performance ideas here.

Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly were both students here. Charles Olson, the poet who served as its final rector, attracted a generation of writers including Robert Creeley. Buckminster Fuller and students built an early large geodesic dome on the campus grounds.

Willem de Kooning taught here. The school was always small, with fewer than twelve hundred students over its whole history. It sat in the hills of western North Carolina for two and a half decades, then closed quietly.

Several of the Lake Eden buildings still stand, on land that is now a summer camp. What remains is the work, and a conviction, which the college demonstrated rather than argued, that a serious encounter with art changes how a person thinks.