Looking Back (Looking Forward): The Black Mountain Experience

From its inception, Black Mountain College was an incubator for experimentation, placing the importance of an integrated liberal arts education at its center. This innovative school, founded in 1933 in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, valued equally the visual arts and the so-called applied arts, along with poetry, music, and dance. 

Looking Back (Looking Forward): The Black Mountain Experience will draw on the combined visual resources of the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. The exhibition will feature a selection of vintage photographs taken at Black Mountain College of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and R. Buckminster Fuller, all central figures in mid-twentieth-century avant-garde music, dance, and culture, along with works of art by them and others associated with the groundbreaking school, including Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kenneth Snelson. Additionally, one of the few surviving films from the era, a silent movie of the dancer Katherine Litz performing her work Thoughts Out of Season (ca. 1952), will continually be screened in the gallery.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website