2 Articles and an Exhibition Highlight the Women of Back Mountain College

"The Spiral Headed Man" sculptural installation by Lorna Blaine Harper (Image: Max Eternity)

Anni Albers is perhaps the best known woman to have passed through Black Mountain College (BMC).  She was one of the original "weavers" at the Bauhaus in Germany, where here husband, Josef Albers, also taught and practiced.  And there are other notable women who graced the halls and grounds of BMC who have received a fair amount of recognition through the years, like photographer Hazel Larsen Archer, and one of my personal favorites, a painter and sculptor named Lorna Blaine Halper whose work was included in a feature article I wrote in 2015 about the Asheville Art Museum.

In recent years, BMC has garnered more attention in the press and the world of art history, in no small part due to the hefty book, Leap Before You Look by Helen Molesworth, and touring exhibition curated by Molesworth and Ruth Erickson, as well as the many years of tireless work carried out at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center.

And earlier this year, 2 new articles continue the trend of celebrating BMC, of which both highlight the contributions of women.  Appearing this spring at Artsy.net was a piece entitled "8 Pioneering Women Artists of Black Mountain College," and in July at Hyperallergic an article entitled "Revisiting the Legacy of Women at Black Mountain College" speaks to an exhibition in Maine at the Yvette Torres Fine Art, entitled "Women of Black Mountain College: Nevertheless They Persisted."

Shared History: Black Mountain College + Arts Museum Celebrates 25th Anniversary

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This summer in Asheville, North Carolina, The Black Mountain College +Arts Museum celebrated their 25th Anniversary with an exhibition entitled Shared History.  Having gained funding for a new and larger location a few years ago, the Shared History exhibition will be the last at their present site.

From the BlackMountainCollege.org website:

2018 marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of BMCM+AC. As the last exhibition to be held in our 56 Broadway gallery before the move to 120 College St. on Pack Square Park in downtown Asheville, Shared History highlights not just the museum’s origins, programs, exhibitions, partnerships, {Re}HAPPENINGs, conferences, and notable collection pieces, but the many ways that this organization has created a space for connection and creativity, fulfilling its original promise to BMC alumni to be not merely a museum memorializing the past, but a center geared towards building community in the present and fostering forward-thinking creativity.

Global tour of exhibitions celebrate the Bauhaus centenary

A global exhibition has begun in recognition of the 100th anniversary of Germany's legendary art school, the Bauhaus.  From Artnet.com, an article speaks to the touring collections that make up the "Bauhaus Imaginista" exhibitions:

Next year, a major series of shows titled “Bauhaus Imaginista” will explore the interaction between the Bauhaus and non-European Modernist movements in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the German art school.

A series of exhibitions will be staged at different art and design museums and institutions in Japan, China, Russia, and Brazil from March 2018, leading up to a landmark exhibition in Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2019, the Bauhaus’s centenary year.  Read more.

Mesoamerican Homage: Josef Albers at the Guggenheim

An article at the New York Times this month reviews the latest exhibition of artwork by Josef Albers.  On display at the Guggenheim in New York, the show entitled Homage to Mexico: Josef Albers and His Reality-Based Abstraction, displays Mesoamerican inspired artwork by Albers, much of which was created while he taught at Black Mountain College in the 1930's and 40's.

From the New York Times piece:

Art rarely thrives in a vacuum. It is by definition polyglot and in flux, buffeted by the movement of art objects, goods and people across borders and among cultures, and also by individual passion. This much, especially the passion part, is demonstrated by “Josef Albers in Mexico,” a quietly stunning exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum that contrasts Albers’s little-known photographs of the great Mesoamerican monuments of Mexico with his glowing abstract paintings.  Read more.

Black Mountain College: A Thumbnail Sketch

In 1989 independent filmmaker, Monty Diamond, made a documentary short on Black Mountain College, which contextualizes the emergence of the school within the global context of rapidly shifting political and educational trends in of the early 1930's.

Harassment and Intimidation of BMC by Federal Government Revealed by Investigative Report

In 2015, an investigative report by Carolina Public Access revealed that US Government perceived Black Mountain College (BMC) as an "internal threat."  This led to a multi-year investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that found no wrong doing, but did create turmoil at the school.

Written by by John Ellison, the report states in part that:

In the early 1940s, for example, the bureau recruited an informant in a class taught by the college’s anthropology professor, Paul Radin, to spy on him, according to Radin’s FBI file. The bureau suspected that Radin, a self-professed radical leftist, was a Communist operative. 

The informant, reporting on classroom discussions, told the FBI that Radin was a staunch advocate for racial integration and indeed a Communist Party member, according to historian David Rice’s 2004 book, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. 

No less than Buckminster Fuller, the famous futurist and inventor who was a visiting professor at BMC in 1948 and ’49, also garnered an FBI file, which was recently released.

The report is entitled "FBI investigation of Black Mountain College revealed in newly released file" and can be read in full here.

Barry Bergdoll, "Learning from the Americas: Gropius and Breuer in the New World"

In 2010, I interviewed Barry Bergdoll in relation to my work educating the public about Marcel Breuer, which had become a necessary aspect to the preservation effort to save Breuer's final building, The Atlanta-Fulton Central Public Library, from demolition.  I had been leading that effort for a number of years, and along the way Bergdoll and many others signed the petition I drafted on behalf of the building and its terraced plaza and monumental sculpture by Richard Hunt, entitled The Wisdom Bridge.  At the time, Bergdoll was (is) a professor at Columbia University, and he also held the title of Chief Curator of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art.  What follows below is a video from a lecture Bergdoll gave in 2015 at Harvard University, entitled "Learning from the Americas: Gropius and Breuer in the New World."  For those who may be unaware, Walter Gropius was the founder of the Bauhaus, and Breuer was one of his star students, and subsequent partner on numerous collaborations in Europe and the United States.  Also, they both taught at Harvard in the years after the closing of the Bauhaus - before, during and after the end of World War II.