Having recently completed a short-course titled "Black Mountain College: A Radical Vision," taught by John Wright, I am filled with awe over the revolutionary impact the relatively short-lived, experimental school has had on the United States.
Indeed, by the late 1940s, it had become the ideal of American experimental education in cross-genre arts. It is credited with launching a remarkable number of artists who spearheaded the avant-garde in the America of the 1960s. BMCës legacy is said to continue to influence an alternative educational philosophy and practice in the U.S. and around the world.
Whatës
more, I am disappointed ÇƒÓ but not surprised ÇƒÓ that the increasingly
progressive Town of Black Mountain, historically a bastion of
conservativism that always frowned on ultra-liberal BMC during its
short existence, allowed the Black Mountain College Museum & Arts
Center to locate elsewhere. Founded in 1993, the BMC+ACës home is at 56
Broadway in downtown Asheville.
BMC opened in
1933 amid great hopes by its founders ÇƒÓ and closed in 1956, saddled
with debt, with many of its professors and students relocating to San
Francisco and New York ÇƒÓ and influencing the burgeoning beatnik scene
in those cities.
BMCës founders
saw the school as an experiment in community, education and the arts.
The core assumption was that a strong liberal and fine arts education
must happen simultaneously inside and outside the classroom. Therefore,
BMC combined communal living with an informal class structure.
While there was
a common misconception that BMC was an art school, it was meant to be a
liberal arts college. It never was accredited, but it was recognized in
eclectic circles as a top-notch school.
BMC never had an
enrollment that exceeded 100 students, having averaged 15 to 100
students per year. About 1,200 students attended BMC during its 23-year
history, but only 60 students received degrees.
Among those who
studied or taught at BMC were its first professors, Josef and Anni
Albers, who fled Nazi Germany after the closing of the Bauhaus; Walter
Gropius, Jacob Lawrence, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, John
Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jonathan Williams, John Wieners, Cy
Twombly, Alfred Kazin, Merce Cunningham and Paul Goodman. Moreover,
BMCës board of directors included William Carlos Williams and Albert
Einstein.
Innovations
credited to BMC include Buckminster Fullerës first geodesic dome
(fashioned from slats from window blinds), Charles Olsonës projective
verse and some of the first performance art in the U.S. ÇƒÓ Cunningham
formed his dance company and Cage staged his first "happening."
So, how was BMC a "radical vision?"
ï Male and
female students lived in the same building and were free to come and go
as they liked, which was uncommon in that time period. Thus, it was
reputed to be a haven of "free love."
ï The school was
progressive, inasmuch as the students could write their own curriculum,
although they had faculty advisors. Part of BMCës scandalous reputation
stemmed from its coeds visiting staid Black Mountain in shorts and
sandals.
ï That such a
school, comprised of many New Yorkers and a number of German refugee
Jews as professors, many holding radical political views, could exist
in the conservative southern Appalachian Mountains at that time.
ï The big lesson
BMC tried to impart to its students was the importance of being useful
one way or another, whatever oneës talents may be. Albers, a central
figure at BMC, held Bahaus ideals that art, life and industry should be
combined.
Its first campus
was in Robert E. Lee Hall at the Blue Ridge Assembly of the YMCA, but
BMC later was asked to move when the YMCA ascertained that its
conservative Christian ÇƒÓ and Southern ÇƒÓ values clashed with those of
the eclectic college. Thus, BMC eventually moved to Lake Eden, which
now serves as the site of Camp Rockmount boys camp.
Interestingly,
BMC was founded after John Andrew Rice, a classics professor at Rollins
College in Florida, was fired. Reportedly, he couldnët get along with
Rollinsë president. His ideas were less structured, featuring more give
and take with students, especially in philosophy. By 1932, Rice was
asked to leave RC by the president.
Enraged, a small
group of faculty and students left RC with Rice and decided to start an
experimental college, based on the principles of John Dewey. BMC was
launched in this area because one professor reportedly knew that the
YMCA resort near Black Mountain was used only in the summer and
therefore vacant nine months a year.
BMC went into a
decline after 1949, for a variety of reasons, but at least partly
because it suffered increasing repression for its radical reputation
during the McCarthy era. FBI agents visited BMC on alarmingly regular
basis.
Ironically, I
think BMCës undoing was its rather anarchistic leadership structure,
with the faculty running the school. The result was a lack of central
authority to focus on recruiting students and faculty and generating
funds to keep the bills paid. The collegeës much-touted lack of
structure ended up being its fatal flaw, too.
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