The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC) is an exhibition and performance space and resource center located at 120 College Street on Pack Square Park in downtown

Asheville, North Carolina Asheville ( ) is a city in, and the county seat of, Buncombe County, North Carolina. Located at the confluence of the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers, it is the largest city in Western North Carolina, and the state's 11th-most populous cit ...

dedicated to preserving and continuing the legacy of educational and artistic innovations of

Black Mountain College Black Mountain College was a private liberal arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and several others. The college was ideologically organized around John Dewey's educational ...

(BMC). BMCM+AC achieves its mission through collection, conservation, and educational activities including exhibitions, publications and public programs.

History

Arts advocate Mary Holden Thompson founded BMCM+AC in 1993 to celebrate the history of

as a forerunner in progressive interdisciplinary education and to explore its extraordinary impact on modern and contemporary art, dance, theater, music, and performance. Today, the museum remains committed to educating the public about BMC's history and raising awareness of its extensive legacy. BMCM+AC's goal is to provide a gathering point for people from a variety of backgrounds to interact through art, ideas, and discourse.

Location

BMCM+AC was first based out of founder Mary Holden Thompson's house in Black Mountain, NC. From 2003 to 2018, BMCM+AC was housed in a storefront gallery at 56 Broadway. In September 2018, BMCM+AC opened a new space at 120 College Street, a relocation and expansion to a newly renovated building on Pack Square Park in the heart of the city. The new 6,000 square foot space doubled the museum's footprint and includes 2,500 square feet of flexible exhibition/event space with a seating capacity for 180, a permanent Black Mountain College history and research center, an expanded library and education center with over 1,500 BMC-related texts, and on-site storage for the museum's permanent collection and research center.

Timeline

*1993 – Founding of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center *1995 – A Black Mountain College reunion is organized and attended by over 100 alumni. *1997 – BMCM+AC launches an ongoing oral history program dedicated to documenting Black Mountain College alumni. *2002 – A regional festival called ''Under the Influence'' takes place, exploring the legacy of Black Mountain College through music, education and performance. *2003 – BMCM+AC opens a permanent museum gallery space in downtown Asheville at 56 Broadway Street. *2009 – The first annual international ReVIEWING Black Mountain College conference is held, organized in partnership with the

University of North Carolina at Asheville The University of North Carolina Asheville (UNC Asheville, UNCA, or simply Asheville) is a public liberal arts university in Asheville, North Carolina, United States. UNC Asheville is the designated liberal arts institution in the University of N ...

(UNCA). *2010 – The first annual HAPPENING is held, an experimental art event featuring over 100 artists held on the former grounds of Black Mountain College. *2010 – A partnership is established with UNCA to provide digitization and archival storage for the growing BMCM+AC archives. *2011 – An

NEH The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...

Landmarks of American History and Culture grant is awarded. *2011 – A new online publication, the ''Journal of Black Mountain College Studies,'' is created. *2012 – The state of North Carolina moves Black Mountain College records to the Western Regional Archives in Oteen, NC, which further establishes Asheville as a center for BMC studies and strengthens BMCM+AC's partnership with the Archives. *2013 – The 80th anniversary of BMC's founding, and the 20th anniversary of BMCM+AC's founding. *2015 – The newly redesigned and renovated 56 Broadway gallery space has its grand reopening. *2016 – NEA awards BMCM+AC an Art Works grant for ''Between Form and Content: Perspectives on

Jacob Lawrence Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", although by his own ...

and Black Mountain College.'' *2017 – BMCM+AC Performance Initiative and Active Archive programs begin. *2018 – BMCM+AC relocates to a new, permanent home at 120 College Street.

Exhibitions

Pieces from the permanent collection, as well as loaned works, are featured via a rotating schedule of temporary exhibitions, which are on display for an average of four months at time. Exhibitions display the many histories of Black Mountain College through shared themes or the work of singular alumni. Exhibitions are often connected to contemporary legacies of BMC through programming or complimentary installations. BMCM+AC has also co-curated exhibitions with a variety of regional institutions, including the

Hickory Museum of Art Hickory Museum of Art (HMA) is an art museum in Hickory, North Carolina which holds exhibitions, events, and public educational programs based on a permanent collection of 19th to 21st century American art. The museum also features a long-term ...

Western Carolina University Western Carolina University (WCU) is a public university in Cullowhee, North Carolina. It is part of the University of North Carolina system. The fifth oldest institution of the sixteen four-year universities in the UNC system, WCU was founded ...

, Folk Art Center, the Western Regional Archives, and the Smith-McDowell House.

Collections

BMCM+AC Permanent Collection

The BMCM+AC permanent collection includes items with dates of creation ranging from 1931 to 2004. All items in the collection have a direct connection to the history of BMC, such as original college publications and other primary source materials. Components of the collection are photographs, ephemera, paintings, drawings/prints, poems/books/monographs/magazines/articles, writings/correspondences. The museum owns a variety of objects, including ceramics/clay, furniture/wood, sculptures, weavings/fiber, collages and mixed media pieces, broadsides/artists’ books and music/album covers. In addition, the collection features a full set of the poetry journal ''The Black Mountain Review'', which formed the group of writers known as the

Black Mountain Poets The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid-20th-century American ''avant-garde'' or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Background Although it lasted only twenty-three ...

. In Summer 2013, the museum acquired a 1971 work by BMC alumnus

Robert Rauschenberg Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines (1954–1964), a group of artwor ...

, ''Opal Gospel, 10 American Indian Poems'', consisting of 10 moveable silkscreened acrylic panels of American Indian stories and imagery. Other noted pieces in the collection are furniture from the original Black Mountain College campuses: two benches from the Quiet House, a place for contemplation, meditation, and observance of special occasions at the Lake Eden campus and a desk designed by

Josef Albers Josef Albers (; ; March 19, 1888March 25, 1976) was a German-born artist and educator. The first living artist to be given a solo show at MoMA and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he taught at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, ...

. BMCM+AC has an original Black Mountain College directional sign from the Lake Eden Campus, which is displayed in the museum library. The collection features many other works by various alumni, faculty and key figures of Black Mountain College including, among many others,

Ruth Asawa Ruth Aiko Asawa (January 24, 1926 – August 5, 2013) was an American modernist sculptor. Her work is featured in collections at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.< ...

Ray Johnson Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson (October 16, 1927 – January 13, 1995) was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as

Kenneth Noland Kenneth Noland (April 10, 1924 – January 5, 2010) was an American painter. He was one of the best-known American color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was though ...

Charles Olson Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was a second generation modern American poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York ...

, M. C. Richards,

Dorothea Rockburne Dorothea Rockburne DFA (born c. 1932) is an abstract painter, drawing inspiration primarily from her deep interest in mathematics and astronomy. Her work is geometric and abstract, seemingly simple but very precise to reflect the mathematical co ...

, Suzi Gablik and Susan Weil. The museum also manages image requests on behalf of the Hazel Larsen Archer Estate.

Hazel Larsen Archer Hazel Larsen Archer (April 23, 1921, Milwaukee, Wisconsin – May 18, 2001, Tucson, Arizona) was a twentieth-century American female photographer who attended and then taught at Black Mountain College. Her images and prints captured life at Blac ...

was the first full-time instructor of photography at Black Mountain College, and her photographs are among the most well-known documentation of the people and daily activities of the college. BMCM+AC has been facilitating oral history documentation since 1999, resulting in a collection of recorded interviews with 69 BMC alumni as of 2019. BMCM+AC also has a research library, which includes approximately 400 BMC-related resources in audio, video and book form. These resources, in addition to the aforementioned oral histories, are available to museum visitors and members as a part the museum's publicly accessible resource center. In addition to the museum's regional use of the collection in exhibitions, the collection is also accessed nationally and internationally by means of traveling exhibitions and loans to other institutions. Works from BMCM+AC's permanent collection have been loaned to the exhibitions ''Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College'' (

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is an art museum and exhibition space located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. The museum was founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Since then it has gone through multiple na ...

Wexner Center for the Arts The Wexner Center for the Arts is the Ohio State University's "multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art". The Wexner Center opened in November 1989, named in honor of the father of Limite ...

and

Hammer Museum The Hammer Museum, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, is an art museum and cultural center known for its artist-centric and progressive array of exhibitions and public programs. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur- ...

), ''Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends'' at the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

, ''Black Mountain College and Interdisciplinary Experiment 1933 - 1957'' at

Hamburger Bahnhof Hamburger Bahnhof is the former terminus of the Berlin–Hamburg Railway in Berlin, Germany, on Invalidenstrasse in the Moabit district opposite the Charité hospital. Today it serves as a contemporary art museum, the , part of the Berlin Nati ...

in Berlin, among others.

The Jargon Society

In 2012, BMCM+AC was chosen as the receiving institution for the remaining publications and archive of

The Jargon Society The Jargon Society is an independent press founded by the American poet Jonathan Williams. Jargon is one of the oldest and most prestigious small presses in the United States and has published seminal works of the American literary avant-garde, i ...

, a small press publisher founded in 1951 by Jonathan Williams. The archive currently includes over 70 titles out of the total 115 Jargon titles. Of the 115 originals in the Jargon catalogue, approximately 85 are books and another 30 are broadsides, pamphlets and other publications. The museum has continued publication under the imprint. The most recent Jargon title as of 2019 is ''The Black Mountain College Anthology of Poetry'', produced in collaboration with the

University of North Carolina Press The University of North Carolina Press (or UNC Press), founded in 1922, is a university press that is part of the University of North Carolina. It was the first university press founded in the Southern United States. It is a member of the Ass ...

''.''

Programs

HAPPENING

The HAPPENING, an annual multidisciplinary art event, honors the interdisciplinary nature of Black Mountain College and pays tribute to the innovations of that community of artists. Hosted on the former BMC campus at Lake Eden, NC, the site-specific event launches a contemporary platform for artists and attendees to experience creativity in the present day. Taking its name from what is widely considered to be the first ‘Happening’ in the United States—from

John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...

’s emphasis on chance and the observer as vital components in artistic creation—the HAPPENING reimagines BMC's tradition of Saturday night parties and performances. Cage's proto-Happening took place at BMC in 1952 and featured Cage reading

Meister Eckhart Eckhart von Hochheim ( – ), commonly known as Meister Eckhart, Master Eckhart

Annual conference

The ReVIEWING Black Mountain College Conference is annual academic event which engages a variety of humanities disciplines. Hosted on the campus of UNC Asheville, the conferences of the past have included film screenings, musical and dramatic productions, hands-on workshops and lectures by new and established scholars.

Performance Initiative

Starting in fall 2017 with support from the

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pitts ...

’s HESH Program, BMCM+AC has worked to bring international artists to the region, with an emphasis on how art can strengthen community and deepen conversations around social justice. This work extends the legacy of Black Mountain College, which brought international artists previously unknown in the region to interact with the culture and practices of Western North Carolina. The stream of programs began in September 2017 with the Southeast premiere of Black Mountain Songs, an expansive choral and visual celebration of Black Mountain College performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and curated by

Bryce Dessner Bryce David Dessner (born April 23, 1976) is an American composer and guitarist based in Paris, as well as a member of the rock band the National. Dessner's twin brother Aaron is also a member of the group. Together they write the music, in coll ...

and

Richard Reed Parry Richard Reed Parry (born October 4, 1977) is a Canadian multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, best known as a core member of the Grammy Award-winning indie rock band Arcade Fire, where he plays a wide variety of instruments, often switching ...

. Other projects have included choreographer Silvana Cardell’s ''Supper, People on the Move'', a dance performance inspired by themes of migration and the complex experience of dislocation. This performance was accompanied by an exhibition of photographs and narratives telling the story of “People on the Move” in the Western North Carolina community. This initiative continued in the spring with the Southeast premiere of ''Dance Heginbotham'' and

Maira Kalman Maira Kalman is an American artist, illustrator, writer, and designer known for her painting and writing about the human condition. She is the author and illustrator of over 30 books for adults and children and her work is exhibited in museums a ...

’s ''The Principles of Uncertainty'', an evening-length dance-theater work by choreographer John Heginbotham and author/illustrator Maira Kalman.

Active Archive

In 2017, BMCM+AC launched an initiative called Active Archive, a stream of programs that pairs the museum's collection with contemporary artists, curators, and cultural thinkers. Components of the initiative include an artist's residency program and commissions of new work. The first artist resident was interdisciplinary artist Martha McDonald, whose output as part of ''Active Archive'' included a curated exhibition and catalogue, as well as community programs such as a performance, conference presentation, and gallery talks.

Publications

The BMCM+AC has published numerous dossiers, exhibition catalogues and books about Black Mountain College, its teachers, and alumni.

Journal of Black Mountain College Studies

Black Mountain College Studies is an online peer-reviewed publication of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis.

Exhibition catalogues

* '' M.C. Richards, Centering: 100 Years, Life + Art'' * ''Begin to See: The Photographers of Black Mountain College'' * ''Zola Marcus: Kinetic Origins'' * ''Randy Shull/Wide Open: Architecture + Design at BMCM+AC'' * ''Ray Spillenger: Rediscovery of a Black Mountain Painter'' * ''Convergence/Divergence: Exploring Black Mountain College + Chicago’s New Bauhaus/Institute of Design'' * ''Dan Rice at Black Mountain College: Painter Among the Poets'' * ''Black Mountain College: Shaping Craft + Design'' * ''John Urbain: No Ideas But Things'' * ''In Site: Late Works by Irwin Kremen'' * ''

Pat Passlof Pat Passlof (August 5, 1928 – November 13, 2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter. Biography Passlof was born in Georgia in 1928 and grew up in New York City, attending Queens College. In the summer of 1948, she studied painting ...

: Selections 1948-2011'' * ''From BMC to NYC: The Tutelary Years of

'' * ''

: Astronomy Drawings'' * ''

Emerson Woelffer Emerson Seville Woelffer (July 27, 1914 – February 2, 2003) was an American artist and arts educator. He was known as a prominent abstract expressionist artist and painter and taught art at some of the most prestigious colleges and universities ...

: At the Center + At the Edge'' * ''

: Black Mountain College Photographer.'' Essays by David Vaughan, Connie Bostic, and Erika Zarow *''ACTIVE ARCHIVE: Martha McDonald'' *''Between Form and Content: Perspectives on Jacob Lawrence and Black Mountain College'' *''VanDerBeek + VanDerBeek''

Books

*''

Basil King William Benjamin Basil King (1859–1928) was a Canadian clergyman who became a writer after retiring from the clergy. His novels and non-fiction were spirituality, spiritually oriented. Life and career He was born on February 26, 1859, in Charl ...

: Between Painting and Writing.'' Poetry chapbook by Basil King, 2016 *''Backpacking in the Hereafter.'' Poetry chapbook by M.C. Richards. Edited by Julia Connor, 2014 *''Cynthia Homire: Vision Quest.'' Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2014 *''Black Mountain Days.'' Michael Rumaker, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2003 *''Remembering Black Mountain College.'' Mary Emma Harris, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 1995

Dossiers

The Dossiers focus on specific BMC alumni and serve both as exhibition catalogues and critical studies. The museum has published dossiers featuring BMC alumni including Joseph Fiore, Fannie Hillsmith, Lore Kadden Lindenfeld,

, Susan Weil, Michael Rumaker,

Gwendolyn Knight Gwendolyn Clarine Knight (May 26, 1913 – February 18, 2005) was an American artist who was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, in the West Indies. Knight painted throughout her life but did not start seriously exhibiting her work until the 1970s. He ...

and Gregory Masurovsky.

References

External links

BMCM+AC website

BMCM+AC library catalogBMCM+AC bookstore

Journal of Black Mountain College Studies

HAPPENING

ReVIEWING Black Mountain College Annual Conference
{{authority control Museums in Asheville, North Carolina Arts centers in North Carolina

Art museums and galleries in North Carolina North Carolina North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east ...

Art museums established in 1993 1993 establishments in North Carolina