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On my recent visit to Asheville in North Carolina I visited the Black Moutain College Museum and Arts Centre now based in an airy building in downtown Asheville. I was going to meet Kate Averett the Outreach Manager, to discuss the Black Mountain College's legacy and its impact on the local community.
Founded by arts advocate Mary Holden in 1993 BMCM+AC celebrates, the history and legacy of the Black Mountain College, which was an experimental community and with an arts-centered education near Black Mountain, North Carolina, that was open from 1933 until 1957.
The BMCM +AC's mission statement states it,
"Preserves and continues the legacy of educational and artistic innovation of the Black Mountain College (BMC). We achieve our mission through collection, conservation, and educational activities including exhibitions, publications, and public programs."
I was to find out from Kate that local awareness-raising and public engagement was very much a work in progress.
Like many, I had come to the Black Mountain College via the Bauhaus. The college had been founded by John Andrew Rice and Theodore Dreier in 1933. Pedagogically the school applied John Dewey's teaching principles, a flexible curriculum, where the arts are central to a liberal arts education. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, students could take classes in literature, dance, and art, if the classes were available, there were no restrictions.
When the Nazis shut the Bauhaus School, in 1933, many of its teachers and students left Germany and Europe and some were invited to or arrived at, the BMC. Joseph and Anni Albers set up the art faculty at the College, who invited former colleague, painter photographer and theatre designer Xanti Schawinsky.
The Bauhaus School had also implemented an interdisciplinary curriculum, with the cross-pollination of design and craft, but with an interest in commercial production. Despite its closure, it continued to be pedagogically influential in the curriculum of art education particularly within Britain, and its approach is mirrored in today's foundation degrees. According to Joanne Ellert (1972)
"Black Mountain College was not in any sense a continuum of the Bauhaus. Both institutions differed markedly in organizational framework. But there is no doubt because of the Alberses' long involvement, the Black Mountain College took over many Bauhaus ways and ideas." (Ellert, p.144)
I was interested in two aspects of the BMC, its engagement with ceramics, and its local legacy. I wanted to connect it with my research on the impact of historical heritage on place, in particular within the context of crafts and ceramics. I was also fascinated to find a connection between Asheville with Stoke-on-Trent via the Bauhaus, even if it is slightly tenuous. For example, Gordon Forsythe, the principle of the Burslem School of Art from 1920s to 1940s had been influenced by new approaches to design, such as the Bauhaus movement, and he arranged for Grete Marks who had been a Bauhaus student, to teach at the school. Similarly to the Bauhaus students, students at the Burslem School of Art were required to have an understanding of both art and industry and how these could interconnect.
However, Kate Averett said that the BMC's reputation was far greater internationally than it was locally, and part of the BMCM+A's remit is to change this. Kate said that BMCM+A is a living museum, providing resources that can be used to be reapplied and reimagined, rather than it being a memorial to the BMC. The BMC legacy is more than its archived artefacts, it is its experimental educational and creative ethos, which the BMCM+A advocates revisiting, encouraging reuse and reinvention. A recent exhibition Materials, Sounds + Black Mountain College brought together contemporary artists to create an experience that "focused on the making of sound through materials". Using experimental practices and interdisciplinary approaches this exhibition had a direct relationship with the innovative creative spirit of the BMC.
I also discussed with Kate the connectivity with the local arts community with the BMC ceramics legacy. Ceramics at BMC only came to prominence for a short time in the last years of the BMC. The influence of those that found their way to BMC, people like Karen Karnes, Peter Voulkos, David Weinrib, Marguerite Friedlander Wildenhain (Bauhaus trained) and M.C. Richards, reverberated far and wide, nationally and internationally. However, although locally in Asheville, people may know some of these names, they are less aware of how their practice was shaped by their time at the BMC. There is an excellent pamphlet "Breaking New Ground The Studio Potter and Black Mountain College", available via BMC+A which Kate referred me to, that discusses the "pivotal moment" in 1952 and 1953 when the BMC was the "venue for a legendary pottery symposium" which included sessions devoted to studio pottery, attracting potters from beyond the US, such as, Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada.
As well as a healthy public engagement programme, BMCM+A is trying to encourage the development of knowledge of the BMC within Higher Education. In 2018 the Appalachian State University in NC had a BMC semester, that awarded BMC Fellows. Furthermore, the BMCM+A has ambitions to make the BMC a major part of the curriculum at the University of North Carolina, which also has a large art department. Kate, also said, that a flexible non-formalised approach to teaching arts and crafts similar to BMC can be found in two local colleges, Warren Wilson College and Penland School of Craft. Warren Wilson College (WWC) is a private liberal arts college in Swannanoa, North Carolina, that has a curriculum that integrates interdisciplinary academic approaches within creative practice across a range of areas, and includes community engagement as a requirement. Penland School of Craft 50 miles North Asheville in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which I had visited on a previous trip to Asheville, runs short courses, in a range of crafts with certification but no formal accreditation.
When I returned to Britain I mentioned to someone how surprised I was about the general unawareness of the people of Asheville of the incredible legacy of the Black Moutain College, and its prominent place internationally within creative arts, design and crafts, in comparison to how knowledgeable the local people of Stoke-on-Trent were of their pottery heritage. The person replied, do local people really have a detailed knowledge of their local heritage? That's a discussion for another day. However, I do know that there are collective and individual efforts across Stoke-on-Trent to encourage engagement with Stoke-on-Trent's historical legacy, which bears some similarity to the BMCM+A's public awareness-raising activities, that demonstrate a spirit of interdisciplinary creativity, a recent one being the British Ceramics Biennial.
References
Ellert, J.C., 1972. The Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. The Journal of General Education, pp.144-152.