RELATED TERMS: Bauhaus; Hochschule fur Gestaltung
Black Mountain College was an experimental liberal arts college in Black Mountain, near Asheville, North Carolina. It was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice and Theodore Dreier and other former faculty members of Rollins College in Florida. It was “the site of a crucial transatlantic dialogue between European modernist aesthetics and pedagogy and their US counterparts” (Diaz, 2015: 1). The stated holistic aim of its founders was “to educate a student as a person and as a citizen” (Kurtz, 1944). Its heyday was between the mid-1940s and the early 1950s.
Inspired by the work of philosopher John Dewey, who joined the College’s advisory board, it was a seminal site of post-1945 art practices in the United States.
References
Diaz, E. (2015) The experimenters: chance and design at black mountain college. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kurtz, K. (1944) ‘Black Mountain College, its aims and methods’, Black Mountain College Bulletin, (8). [Reprinted from The Haverford Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter 1944.]
Incomplete ... 