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Students lounging on dock, Lake Eden, n.d. Photo by John Campbell. Photo by Josef Breitenbach. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina, Asheville, NC.
For a brief slice of history along the shore of North Carolina’s Lake Eden, there existed a utopian educational experiment called Black Mountain College. The Hammer’s new exhibition, Leap Before You Look, begins with a gallery dedicated to the school’s founding couple in art: Anni and Joseph Albers. The interplay between Joseph’s highly formal abstract paintings and Anni’s magnificent textiles are a fitting opening to the show’s deft exploration of the long-defunct College.
Cross-pollination was encouraged at Black Mountain; the juxtapositions within the exhibition of art with architecture, pedagogy, poetry, and music sing. A room devoted to the graphical scores of John Cage and the translations by his collaborator, pianist David Tudor, bleeds over into recordings of experimental poetry and dynamic photographs by Hazel Larson Archer of Merce Cunningham mid-dance. Elsewhere, textiles and ceramics are given equal weight to their pictorial brethren, in keeping with Black Mountain’s Bauhaus roots. Ruth Aswawa’s Untitled (S.272) (1955) a breathtaking, voluptuous wire sculpture holds its own next to Minutae (1954), Robert Rauschenberg’s brightly tropical first combine (made as a set piece for a school theater production).
The fact that the college was not an art school at all, but a liberal arts institution founded to include art at its core is worth noting. In a time when education, particularly in the arts, is so embattled, surely there are lessons to learn from this scrappy, innovative pedagogical experiment. The formidable legacy of the wide constellation of minds attracted to and nurtured by Black Mountain speaks to the immense creative and transformative potential in the fuzzy zones where disciplines overlap, and the power to be found in collaborative communities.
Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957 runs February 21–May 15, 2016 at The Hammer Museum (10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90024).
Josef Albers in a drawing class, ca. 1939-40. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina, Ashville, NC.
Hazel Larsen Archer, Elizabeth Schmitt Jennerjahn and Robert Rauschenberg, ca. 1952. Gelatin silver print. 6 1/4 × 9 ¼ in. (15.9 × 23.5 cm). Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer and Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center.
Nancy Newhall, Buckminster Fuller, Black Mountain College, 1948/1990. Gelatin silver print. 7 1/2 × 9 1/2 in. (19.1 × 24.1 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. ©1948, Nancy Newhall, ©2014 The Estate of Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. Permission to reproduce courtesy of Scheinbaum and Russek LTD., Santa Fe, NM.
Students walking toward Black Mountain College barn and silo, n.d. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina, Asheville, NC.
Xanti Schawinsky teaching a portraiture class, n.d. Photo by Helen Post Modley. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina, Asheville, NC.
Anni Albers, Knot 2 (1947). Gouache on paper, 17 × 21 1/8 inches. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society New York. Image courtesy of The Hammer Museum. Photo: Tim Nighswander (Imaging 4 Art).
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S. 272) (c. 1955). Copper and iron wire, 108 × 15 × 15 inches. © Estate of Ruth Asawa. Photo: Laurence Cuneo.
Joseph Fiore, Black Mountain, Lake Eden (1954). Watercolor on paper, 14 × 18 inches. Image courtesy of Asheville Art Museum, Black Mountain College Collection.
Ruth Asawa, BMC (BMC.76) (no date). Ink on paper. 21 1⁄2 x 17 1⁄2 inches. © Estate of Ruth Asawa. Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Josef Albers, Tenayuca (1943). Oil on Masonite, 22 ½ × 43 ½ inches. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Blackwell.
Cy Twombly, La-La (1953). Oil-based house paint and graphite on paper, 19 1/2 × 27 1/4 inches. Image courtesy The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection. © Cy Twombly Foundation.
Photography class in Cabbage Patch (no date). Photo by Barbara Morgan. Image courtesy of Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina, Asheville, NC.