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This chapter examines Black Mountain College, an experimental college of exiles—cultural, political, and social, who created a utopian Appalachian avant-garde art community that emerged in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1933. The author examines the history, social ecosystem and legacy if this innovative and short-lived college that played host to the likes of R. Buckminster Fuller and John Cage.

Black Mountain College’s 1952 Pottery Seminar has been an overlooked moment in the college’s history. But the Seminar stands as a pioneering moment, when the therapeutic properties of ceramics were integrated into an avant-garde context utilizing Zen philosophy, rather than a discourse of welfare. This is particularly significant against the backdrop of rural North Carolina, Black Mountain’s immediate vicinity, an Appalachian state with a history of vernacular craft initiatives largely established by women and driven by strong social mandates. It is previously unknown that local groups were in attendance: through archival evidence, the Pottery Seminar’s legacy can be further recovered through the pedagogical contributions of women, which converged with Eastern ideas to alter the medium’s reception in the United States.

The potter and poet M.C. (Mary Caroline) Richards (1916-1999) was a crucial interlocutor between disparate artistic media and its networks of artists and thinkers in 1950s American art. Working across literature, theater, and ceramics, she readily embraced interdisciplinary practice before the term existed. In her 1964 book, Centering: On Pottery, Poetry and the Person, she developed a theory of artistic practice rooted in “wholeness,” where soul, body, and mind are conjoined, and in concert with the vitality of community, morally incompatible with either the heroic (or merely ironic) aims of the avant-garde. This chapter examines Richards’s contributions at Black Mountain College and her erasure as a collaborator, and influence upon, John Cage, whose legacy has eclipsed her own.

This chapter examines Jonathan Williams’s activities as the editor of the seminal Jargon Society press and as a poet. In both respects, this chapter argues, Williams’s reputation has been distorted as a result of his early association with Black Mountain College and the school of poetry that emerged from it in the late 1950s. Although chapter three examines Williams’s links with the college and the formative influence that its rector Charles Olson had on his poetry and his publishing, it also makes a makes a strong claim for disassociating Williams’s reputation from the exclusive, binding labels of ‘Black Mountain poet’ and ‘Black Mountain publisher.’ Williams, it is argued, expressed considerable aversion to not only being labeled a ‘Black Mountain’ poet but to being associated with any poetry school or movement. Chapter 3 examines the ways in which Williams has resisted and complicated the Black Mountain label, both in his poetry and in his publishing, by paying particular attention to his use of vernacular speech in his poetry and through an abiding fascination with what was initially an imagined England that would become more tangible as a result of his semi-annual residency in England from the late 1960s onwards.

This chapter discusses the University's role in the arts in general, providing a brief overview of the emergence of arts support within American universities, beginning with Columbia University in 1896, through today's commissioning and presenting initiatives on campuses across the country. The idea of the university as “incubator” articulates the vision of stimulating the potential creativity of students through the arts. Specifically, the legacy of the Center is discussed: June in Buffalo festival; artists' spaces in Buffalo today; Creative Associates now in leadership positions at major educational institutions, training a new generation of players; archives of music scores and recordings.

Chapter 3 examines the most important institution that Weatherford guided in his life, the Blue Ridge Assembly (a YMCA summer conference center in Black Mountain, N.C.) and the efforts he made there to improve race relations. Under Weatherford’s guidance in the 1910s and 1920s, the facility hosted African American speakers (among them George Washington Carver, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Robert Russa Moton) and students. These guests always endured some form of segregation during their stays, but their presence and interaction with whites are notable because such events were extremely rare at the time. Indeed, up until 1930 Blue Ridge was one of the few places in the South where such visits could occur and where the topic of race could be discussed. This chapter looks closely at the context of the South at the time, the limits to the programs at Blue Ridge, and why Weatherford did not push harder against segregation. It also illuminates the influence of this institution on a growing number of white liberals of the next era and how this place sowed the seeds of their activism. Finally, it explores the changing procedures Weatherford and Blue Ridge employed in handling racial issues.

This chapter focuses on the poetics of Mayan hieroglyphs, with special attention on how their formal features integrate the temporal contradictions of decoloniality. It recounts how poets Charles Olson and Alurista each studied Mayan glyphs, finding in them a means to integrate political contradiction in a Mayan philosophy of parallelism. The philosophy of parallelism associated with glyphs is called kajulew in K’iche’ Mayan, which anthropologist Dennis Tedlock translates as “mythistory,” or the interpenetration of mythic and historical times. As Tedlock and others have pointed out, that interpenetration does not resolve into synthesis. Mesoamerican mythistory is like a weaving with intersecting threads, in which the threads of mythic and historical times depend on one another but produce no unifying third position by which to resolve antinomies or contradictions. The threads are suspended in a state of complementary intensification, and they are distinctly inscribed in the aesthetics of the glyphs. For Alurista, this idea helps to reconfigure problematics of identity beyond set racial categories of Latino and Anglo. This chapter also examines how these ideas affected Black Mountain aesthetic, focusing especially on visual artist Cy Twombly’s Poems to the Sea.

In 1948, Willem de Kooning taught at the Black Mountain College summer session in Asheville, North Carolina. Elaine thrived in this experimental ambience. She worked on Buckminster Fuller’s first geodesic dome, studied with Josef Albers, and played the ingénue in The Ruse of Medusa, choreographed by Merce Cunningham, with music by Erik Satie played by John Cage. While Bill labored over his breakthrough painting Asheville, Elaine produced rhythmic abstractions on wrapping paper. That fall, he painted Woman, the first of his grotesque female figures. It is impossible to fully parse the real-life and artistic influences that led to these paintings, but his deepening rift with Elaine was surely among them. The following summer, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, she studied with Hans Hofmann and socialized with friends. One of her self-portraits was included in a group exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery that fall; portraiture would change the course of her creative

The GI Bill of Rights adopted John Andrew Rice and Theodore Dreier's experimental curricula and this was formulated at Black Mountain College. This colleage was found to be different compared to other mainstream colleges. This allowed Arthur Penn to attend college as it meant that he was already paid for. Black Mountain College was established in 1933 as a result of the rebellion and the Depression and it catered to the disenfranchised. The school was able to attract and build various iconoclasts that would provide change and inspiration to the world for the remainder of the century. Sadly it closed twenty-three years later. During Penn's stay at the college in 1947, the Bauhaus were defeated by the Nazis, so some of them went to the States. In America, the Bauhaus were perceived as a gain. Because their credentials fell short and they were thus denied positions at various colleges, the Bauhaus artists opted to return to Black Mountain College.