Black Mountain College at the ICA
Went to “Leap Before You Look”, an exhibit at the ICA about Black Mountain College. As Terri said, “why don’t people talk about this place all the time?”.
It’s a good question.
As this New Yorker article from October points out,
It seems as though half the midcentury American avant-garde came through Black Mountain in one capacity or the other. The I.C.A. exhibition includes works by (besides Rauschenberg and the Alberses) Ruth Asawa, John Cage, John Chamberlain, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Robert Duncan, Buckminster Fuller, Shoji Hamada, Lou Harrison, Ray Johnson, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Charles Olson, Ben Shahn, David Tudor, and Cy Twombly. Black Mountain produced art of almost every kind.
It was hugely inspiring. So much of what has always resonated with me about the Bauhaus holds true with BMC, except it happened in America. I kind of want to start my own artist colony / arts college now.