Raleigh Rambles

Black Mountain College Continues to Inspire, Fascinate

Black Mountain College and BMC+AC,  the Asheville museum and art center devoted to its memory and influence, continue to generate artistic and literary responses that reverberate with the powerful cultural forces that coursed through the college until 1957.  An upcoming show at the Asheville center will feature Ray Johnson, whose personal correspondence with me is described on my Black Mountain page.  I am looking forward to attending and writing about the show, whose curator,  Sebastian Matthews, was so welcoming and enthusiastic at the recent BMC conference. He started a blog just for this show and it’s full of wonderful Ray J images and stories. Much more about Ray Johnson before and after the show in February.

From BMC to NYC: The Tutelary Years of Ray Johnson (1943-1966)

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Jonathan Williams feature by Jeffery Beam and Richard Owens

Jeffery Beam, UNC botanical librarian and Hillsborough poet, has made a major contribution to Black Mountain documentation with his recently posted Jonathan Williams archive, which gathers a wide selection of photography, poetry and essays in order to capture the unique vision of Jonathan Williams.  Jeffery and Richard describe the scope of the project below.

The work he produced for more than half a century is such that no one activity or identity takes primacy over any other. He is never only a poet or photographer, an essayist or publisher. What we find instead in the figure of Williams is a continuity that cuts across these practices — something we might call a poetics of gathering. All of his efforts are linked through an unswerving desire to collect and preserve, harvest and distribute.

The project,  which resides at Jacket Magazine, includes a photo essay, past essays and new pieces in response to Williams’ death in 2008 or commissioned for this project. More details from Jeffery:

 You’ll also discover 26 portraits of Jonathan from the age of about 12 up until 2005 – with other images scattered throughout the essays, 24 photographs by Jonathan – a number of which have never been published, works of art in honor of Jonathan, an unpublished interview with Jonathan by editor Richard Owens, a complete Jargon bibliography by Owens, and a selected Jonathan Williams publications bibliography compiled by me from a forthcoming complete bibliography.  Jeffery Beam

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Raleigh has some small claims to fame relative to Black Mountain lore.  Long before Glenwood South became known as an art center, Gilliam & Peden Art Gallery on Glenwood Avenue organized a show, curated by Ben Williams, called Black Mountain Connection. It featured Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as many others as seen below.  This is my copy of the prospectus for the 1987 show.

(click to enlarge)

The NC Museum of Art hosted a major exhibition of BMC material in 1987.  In conjunction with this show, which also traveled to Annandale-on-Hudson and New York City, New York, , MIT Press published a truly sumptuous volume entitled  The Arts at Black Mountain College by Mary Emma Harris.  The book is wonderful, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t now come now with the checklist of the exhibition which is tucked inside my copy from the show.  Looking over it, I recall the intense immediacy evoked by the multitude of so many different kinds of objects in that show.  There were architectural models, prints, oils and products of every imaginable drawing device and surface; announcements, bulletins, programs, photographs, glyphs, scores, weavings, calligraphy, letterpress printings and bound books.  You got a sense of the interspersing and practical (yet clearly micro-utopian) productivity of this self-contained culture studying culture.  The exhibition, The Arts at Black Mountain College  1933-1957 was organized by the Edith C. Blum Art Institute of Bard College and contained 219 items.

NCSU’s Gregg Museum has also done its part for BMC.  Anni Albers was featured in a 2007 lecture (links to pdf) by Mary Emma Harris (who had previously lectured there about the architecture of Black Mountain).  The NCSU Colleges of Textile and Design offers specialized degrees combining design and technology through the Anni Albers Scholars Program, which “is named for a designer who exemplifies the ideals and goals to which the program aspires: textile designer and artist Anni Albers.”

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January 15, 2010 - Posted by raleighnaturalist | architecture, art, Black Mountain, literary, Ray Johnson | art, Black Mountain College, Jargon Society Press, Jeffery Beam, Jonathan Williams, Ray Johnson