The list of painters associated with Black Mountain College is a who’s who of mid-20th century artists. From influential and groundbreaking Europeans like Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, and Theodoros Stamos to profoundly original Americans including Robert Rauschenberg, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Motherwell, Elaine de Kooning, Kenneth Noland, Dorothea Rockburne, Cy Twombly, and Jack Tworkov, the cumulative impact these painters have had on the history and trajectory of art is remarkable.
Read MoreThis October, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens the first comprehensive U.S. museum exhibition on Black Mountain College (BMC), a small, experimental school in North Carolina whose influence on art practice and pedagogy still has profound impact today. Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 focuses on how, despite its brief existence, Black Mountain College became a seminal meeting place for many of the artists, musicians, poets, and thinkers who would become leading practitioners of the postwar period. Figures such as Anni and Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ruth Asawa, Robert Motherwell, Gwendolyn and Jacob Lawrence, Cy Twombly, Jack Tworkov, Franz Kline, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley taught and studied at the college, among many others.
Read More