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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I’ll be posting about the Nashville Film Festival this week — the event got underway this past Thursday afternoon. I saw a number of films before the fest for my annual preview I write for The Contributor. On Thursday I went to pick up my credentials, and was able to score a ticket for the Stars in Shorts program on Friday — the movie had gone to rush status likely because of the “stars” in these short movies.

A highlight in the program included “Break” in which a well-to-do, elderly British couple befriends a struggling, working class couple with a small child. “Break” stars John Hurt who’s fantastic of course. The acting is strong all around, and the relationships between the struggling young adults and their elderly counterparts are quickly established and thoroughly believable. That said, the film’s dramatic ending — which includes a double suicide — was too big of a leap too quickly for me. Short films can be tricky when it comes to pacing, and I wish writer/director Nick Moss might have tried to tell a smaller story with an arc and an ending the audience could’ve more fully invested in.

On Saturday I saw the Experimental Showcase which will screen again on Thursday at 3pm. I’d definitely recommend this showcase for the amazing cinematography in Line Klungseth Johansen’s “Process: Breath” and the visionary assemblage of silent film footage and the aesthetics of alchemical engravings in Stacey Steers’ “Edge of Alchemy” which must be one of the best animated films at the festival. Russell Sheaffer and Aaron Michael Smith’s “Etude 1a: Release (I)” uses found footage of cowboy culture and livestock to tell a poetic history of the American West. The movie is sometimes mesmerizing even if it ended way too early for my taste. “This is Yates” is the best thing I’ve seen at the fest so far. Josh Yates’ montage of home movie footage is a visionary exploration of memory, family, everyday life in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and it reminded me of cinema’s capacity to transform the blunt and the brutal into something beautiful, even incandescent.

Over Saturday and Sunday I also saw two programs of short documentaries. I recommend both programs which will screen again this week. Documentary Showcase I will play again on Wednesday at 5:30 pm. I really liked “Four Quarters of Silence” which told the story of the Texas School for the Deaf’s varsity football team, and “The Moderators” which illuminated the work days of the real life people who are making sure that Facebook isn’t awash in dick pics. My favorite of the program was Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck’s “10 Meter Tower” which pictures a succession of everyday Swede’s attempting to will themselves to jump into a pool from the titular tower. It’s a simple premise that results in high anxiety and hilarity alike and the filmmakers’ commitment to mostly static shots picturing their protagonists trying to will themselves to jump is a masterstroke. Documentary Showcase II screens again on Monday at 3:30 pm. Adam Roffman’s “The Collection” gives a history lesson in movie advertising while also offering gorgeous eye candy for lovers of letterpress printing, and Edvard Karijord and Bendik Mondal’s “I’m Free” is actually a student film that blew away the festival jury who decided it belonged in the main competition instead of in the student category. The movie is a poetic meditation on the life of a mentally ill man whose disappearance continues to haunt the family and friends he left behind.

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Hey, Insomniacs! I’m getting a slow start on the week after spending Monday driving back from Asheville, North Carolina. I played a solo singer/songwriter gig there over the weekend and had a real blast bumming around that great little mountain town with my girlfriend. Check out my YouTube channel to see videos from the show.

On the way home through the Smokies we were challenged with intermittent rain and dense fog, and there was plenty of time to think back on the weekend when we were slowed down. I recalled that Jack Kerouac had spent time in the area — Thomas Wolfe, Asheville’s literary saint, was Kerouac’s hero, and Kerouac made a number of trips to North Carolina to visit his sister’s family in Rocky Mount.

I’m a huge fan of the Beat Generation writers and I’m particularly pleased about recent articles, books and other media that continue to give them credit for their culture-changing artistry while also dropping the hero-worship that’s masked their less-savory qualities as naturally-flawed human beings: Kerouac was a deadbeat dad, a conservative reactionary and an alcoholic who drank himself to death; Burroughs murdered his wife in a very sketchy accidental shooting.

We celebrated Burroughs’ Centenary last year and I joined in with plenty of posts about the writer. I think of Burroughs as one of the most important satirists of the last century, but I totally understand why many people find him to be plain creepy. Talking about the beat scene on our trip back to Nashville, my girlfriend reminded me of a recent This American Life episode that found host, Ira Glass, confronting his own resistance to Burroughs by playing an audio documentary presented by Iggy Pop that opened his mind to the author and his work specifically because it didn’t shy away from the dark shadow cast by Burroughs’ often-tragic life and horror-filled writings.

Here’s that episode in honor of Burroughs 101st birthday this February (February 5, 1914).

Stay Awake!

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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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