Black Mountain College

Black Mountain College was a highly influential educational institution founded in the town of Black Mountain, North Carolina, USA, in 1933, where education was experimental and centred on an interdisciplinary approach. At the heart of its programme lay the idea that art was central to a liberal education, and the college itself was governed democratically by its own faculty and students, who worked and farmed the land together. Its first leading art teacher was Josef Albers, a refugee from the Nazi-closed Bauhaus, who brought European modernist teaching methods with him. Faculty and visitors over the years included the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, the architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller, and the poets and painters Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Rauschenberg. It was here that one of the first "happenings" took place, and the crossing of ideas among disciplines nourished the post-war American avant-garde. Financial difficulties forced the college to close in 1957, but its impact on American art, dance, and music is hard to overstate.