Hazel Larsen Archer, Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College, ca. 1952-53, vintage gelatin silver print, 8.5 by 5.75 inches. Courtesy of the Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection.

This movement towards transdisciplinary integration looks a lot like the collaborative, genre-jumping, improvisational forms of production that defined the mid 20th century’s Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The school’s multidisciplinary approach has been the subject of renewed interest, most recently seen in the 2016 traveling survey “Look Before You Leap: Black Mountain College 1933-1957” organized by the UCLA Hammer Museum, and the launch the same year of the School of the Alternative, a summer program located on the original Black Mountain campus.

Josef Albers, DR-b from Homage to the Square, 1968, screen print, 23-1/2” x 23-1/2”. The Peabody College Collection, Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery

A new exhibition “Looking Back (Looking Forward): The Black Mountain Experience,” on view at Vanderbilt University’s Fine Arts Gallery in Nashville through March 2, retraces the radical educational experiment that brought European Modernism to the American South, creating a vision of tomorrow that we’re still catching up with today.

The exhibition opens with Josef Albers’s DR-b, an abstract geometric screen print featuring concentric rectangles of blue, green, gray and black. Albers was both a student and a teacher at the legendary Weimar Bauhaus, where he met his wife Anni (though Anni is inexplicably excluded from the exhibition). But when the school was closed by the Nazis, one of modernism’s most influential educators relocated to North Carolina, where he became the head of Black Mountain College and lead its painting program from 1933 to 1949. DR-b is part of a series called “Homage to the Square,” which was produced alongside a groundbreaking class on color that Albers developed at Black Mountain.

Albers’s tenure at Black Mountain began just one year after Hans Hoffman began teaching at the Art Students League of New York. Championing abstract painting and artists such as Jackson Pollock, Hoffman and his students became emblematic of modernism’s American immigration.At the same time, Albers brought the more irreverent, holistic, and utopian philosophies of the Bauhaus to North Carolina.

Hazel Larsen Archer, R. Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College, summer 1948, vintage gelatin silver print, 9-1/2” x 7-3/8”. Courtesy of the Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection.
Hazel Larsen Archer, R. Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College, summer 1948, vintage gelatin silver print, approx. 9.5 inches by 7 inches. Courtesy of the Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection.

This exhibition is primarily an archival exercise that sometimes resembles a solo exhibition by Black Mountain photographer Hazel Larsen Archer, who was a student as well as the school’s first full-time teacher of photography in 1949. Her images of Buckminster Fuller, John Cage and Merce Cunningham are the spine of the display at Vanderbilt. One of the teachers associated with Black Mountain’s high-water period, Archer taught students such as Robert Rauschenberg, who carried the college’s interdisciplinary, materially inclusive approach to a global audience.

Rauschenberg’s offset lithograph Cover for the Magazine of the Miami Herald is one of the later works included in “Looking Back (Looking Forward).” Leo Rosenblatt, the art director for the Herald’s Sunday magazine, created a printmaking process called Stat Art using light-sensitive newspaper printing plates, large sheets of commercial copy film, and mixed-media drawings to make large runs of lithograph art prints on commercial newspaper presses with no deterioration of the original image. On December 30, 1979, the Miami Herald printed 650,00 original Rauschenberg prints as the cover for its Sunday magazine – the artist even signed 150 copies for the lucky readers who realized what had landed on their doorsteps. A visual cacophony of overlapping images and text related to South Florida, the print’s irreverent multimedia sensibility can be traced back to Black Mountain.

Robert Rauschenberg, Cover for magazine of the Miami Herald, December 30, 1979, 1979; offset lithograph, 12.5 by 21.5 inches. Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery Collection.

But the North Carolina institution was not exclusively an art school. Black Mountain provided a wide-ranging educational curriculum that put art at the center of its John Dewey-inspired “learning by doing” ethos. Albers ultimately came to view Black Mountain College as an institution where independent thinking and imagination were the best strategies for approaching complex problems. Despite all the bulls on Wall Street and gurus in Silicon Valley, the human solutions we’ll need to face America’s increasingly uncertain future may have already taken root on a mist-covered mountaintop in the American South.

“Looking Back (Looking Forward): The Black Mountain Experience” at Vanderbilt University’s Fine Arts Gallery closed on March 2.

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Buckminster Fuller is one of my heroes and I wanted to add this post to celebrate the the 65th anniversary of his greatest project in 1949. Here’s some of the Wiki about the great architect/inventor/philosopher’s Geodesic Dome…

Fuller taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the summers of 1948 and 1949,[17] serving as its Summer Institute director in 1949. There, with the support of a group of professors and students, he began reinventing a project that would make him famous: the geodesic dome. Although the geodesic dome had been created some 30 years earlier by Dr. Walther Bauersfeld, Fuller was awarded United States patents. He is credited for popularizing this type of structure.

One of his early models was first constructed in 1945 at Bennington College in Vermont, where he frequently lectured. In 1949, he erected his first geodesic dome building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. It was 4.3 meters (14 feet) in diameter and constructed of aluminum aircraft tubing and a vinyl-plastic skin, in the form of an icosahedron. To prove his design, and to awe non-believers, Fuller suspended from the structure’s framework several students who had helped him build it. The U.S. government recognized the importance of his work, and employed his firm Geodesics, Inc. in Raleigh, North Carolina to make small domes for the Marines. Within a few years there were thousands of these domes around the world.

As far as I’m concerned all buildings everywhere should embrace Fuller’s efficient design principles, and every high-rise rectangle is a monument to ignorance, arrogance, and the capitalist status quo of waste, greed and lack of vision. In honor of the great man’s life and ideas, here’s a full-length documentary illuminating a great mind and a great heart…

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