Black Mountain College: The Most Influential School That Vanished

Black Mountain College has been closed since 1957, but its impact on art, music, dance, theatre, design, literature and thinking lives on.

This is a brief look at the legacy of this progressive liberal arts school, and the impact its artists including Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, M. C. Richards, Cy Twombly, Ruth Asawa, Arthur Penn, Robert Motherwell, and others.

Want to tour the campus?
https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/...

00:00 Introduction
00:27 What Made BMC Unique
01:18 The 1930s and The Formation of BMC
03:41 Campus Life
04:38 Life and Art / Theatre Piece No. 1
05:26 Desegregation
06:11 Closure
06:26 Legacy and Impact of the Artists of BMC

UPDATE: My statements beginning with "There were no grades..." is not truly accurate. This has actually been mythologized somewhat over the years, and I apologize for spreading the misconception!

The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center reached out to me with an important point of clarification on the topic of grades at BMC:

“While academically rigorous, students at Black Mountain College would often never see their grades and could stay at the college as long as felt necessary for their own academic and personal growth. There are a few dozen distinguished graduates of Black Mountain College, but graduation was never required or expected. Many students went on to distinguished graduate degrees based solely on recommendations from Black Mountain Faculty."

Also, it's worth clarifying that the statement about "30 faculty members" is a generalization for any given year. Because many faculty members rotated through the ranks over the two and a half decades the college was open, there were many more total faculty members.

I DO NOT OWN OR PLACE ANY CLAIM OF OWNERSHIP ON ANY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS VIDEO. This video is intended only as an educational look at the history of this North Carolina institution and its impact.

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