The third and final exhibition in Black Mountain College: An Exhibition Series examines the unlikely partnerships and collaborations between the College’s progressive guests and students of tremendous energy and talent. In these radically new works, elements such as music, dance, lighting and the spoken word were conceived independently by artists from different disciplines who then performed simultaneously as a collaborative.

The spirit of collaboration at the College in many cases became the foundation of lifelong friendships, unlikely partnerships and even more lasting arguments.  John Cage and Josef Albers forever disagreed about the role of chance in artistic production; but came together over their mutual appreciation of smoothly functioning management.  Albers and Buckminster Fuller maintained a mutual admiration through their long lifetimes, sharing a desire that a better design of society could be achieved by a close attention to the formal constitution of the objects surrounding us.

The College’s role in initiating new methods and objects of artistic production, and a new way of generating avant-garde critiques about the construction and representation of reality is unparrelled.  Learning a few of the lessons of Black Mountain will allow us to marshal the hard-fought gains of the past towards a better future, and to observe nascent zones of innovative culture happening in the present.

Works by artists such as John Cage, Robert Creeley, Robert Rauschenberg and Joel Oppenheimer are included highlighting the College's role in initiating new methods and objects of artistic production, and a new way of generating avant-garde critiques about the construction and representation of reality is unparalleled.

The project is sponsored by the Asheville Savings Bank, the Friends of Mountain History, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Seth Sprague Charitable and Educational Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes a great nation deserves great art. The exhibition is organized by the Asheville Art Museum and Guest Curated by Eva Diaz.

Image Credits:

Robert Rauschenberg, Drawing for Joel Oppenheimer’s The Dancer, 1951, ink on paper, 7 X 5 inches. Courtesy of James S. Jaffe Rare Books.

Clemens Kalischer, Buckminster Fuller and Elaine de Kooning in The Ruse of the Medusa, Black Mountain College, 1948, black and white photograph. Courtesy of the Artist.