A veritable archive of material on the visual, performing, and literary artists who made Black Mountain College the most successful experiment in the history of American art education.

La exposición refleja la historia del Black Mountain College (BMC), fundado en 1933 en Carolina del Norte y concebido como universidad experimental que situaba al arte en el centro de una educación liberal que pretendía educar mejor a los ciudadanos para participar en la sociedad democrática. La educación era interdisciplinaria y concedía gran importancia al debate, la investigación y la experimentación, dedicando la misma atención a las artes visuales –pintura, escultura, dibujo- que a las llamadas artes aplicadas –tejidos, cerámica, orfebrería, así como a la arquitectura, la poesía, la música y la danza.

Practically every major artistic figure of the mid-twentieth century spent some time at Black Mountain College: Harry Callahan, Merce Cunningham, Walter Gropius, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Aaron Siskind, Cy Twombly - the list goes on and on. Yet scholars have tended to view these artists' time at the college as little more than prologue, a step on their way to greatness. With The Experimenters, Eva Diaz reveals the influence of Black Mountain College - and especially of three key instructors, Josef Albers, John Cage, and R. Buckminster Fuller - to be much greater than that. Diaz's focus is on experimentation. Albers, Cage, and Fuller, she shows, taught new models of art making that favored testing procedures rather than personal expression. The resulting projects not only reconfigured the relationships among chance, order, and design - they helped redefine what artistic practice was, and could be, for future generations. Offering a bold, compelling new angle on some of the most widely studied creative minds of the twentieth century, The Experimenters does nothing less than rewrite the story of art in the mid-twentieth century.

Established in 1933, Black Mountain College came to be regarded as one of the most important artistic and intellectual communities of 20th century America. In this history, the author documents the college's 23 year history, from its most brilliant moments of self-reinvention to its lowest moments of petty infighting.

An essential selection of one of the most important twentieth-century creative movements Black Mountain College had an explosive influence on American poetry, music, art, craft, dance, and thought; it’s hard to imagine any other institution that was so utopian, rebellious, and experimental. Founded with the mission of creating rounded, complete people by balancing the arts and manual labor within a democratic, nonhierarchical structure, Black Mountain was a crucible of revolutionary literature. Although this artistic haven only existed from 1933 to 1956, Black Mountain helped inspire some of the most radical and significant midcentury American poets. This anthology begins with the well-known Black Mountain Poets—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov—but also includes the artist Josef Albers and the musician John Cage, as well as the often overlooked women associated with the college, M. C. Richards and Hilda Morley.

Begin to See: The Photographers of Black Mountain College is the first in-depth exhibition and catalogue devoted to photography taken at the college and features over 100 photographs by more than forty artists as well as essays, photographer biographies, and a chronology of photography at Black Mountain College.