Black Mountain College: Twenty-Three Years That Changed American Art

Josef Albers arrived in November of nineteen thirty-three with his wife Anni, speaking almost no English, carrying no money, and having just lost his job when the Nazi government closed the Bauhaus in Dessau. He had been one of the most innovative art educators in Europe. Someone in North Carolina had heard that a new kind of college was opening in the mountains and needed teachers. The college, Black Mountain, had no endowment, no accreditation, no athletic program, no formal graduation requirements, and no separation between faculty and student labor. Everyone built the furniture. Everyone cleared the land. The assumption was that making things with your hands and thinking about them were the same activity.

Albers ran the art and design curriculum for sixteen years. Anni Albers, a weaver who had been told at the Bauhaus that weaving was a lesser discipline, built one of the most influential textile programs in American art education. She later became the first textile artist given a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

The community they built pulled in people who did not fit elsewhere. John Cage came to Black Mountain and staged what some historians call the first American happening, a theatrical event with no script, in nineteen fifty-two. Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly were both students there in the same period. Buckminster Fuller built his first geodesic dome on the college grounds in nineteen forty-eight, the structure that would eventually become his most recognized idea. Merce Cunningham danced there.

The college folded in nineteen fifty-seven for mundane reasons: debts, internal disagreements, shrinking enrollment. There was no ceremony. No building was saved as a historic site. The Lake Eden campus is currently used as a summer camp. No National Historic Landmark designation protects it.

The through-line in Black Mountain's story is the question of what institutions are for. The college produced almost no graduates in the conventional sense. It produced a generation of American artists who defined the second half of the twentieth century.