ABSTRACT
It is no accident that in the summer of 2015, the Deutsche Nationalgalerie in Berlin put on a show dedicated to Black Mountain College, 1 the legendary North Carolina art school that influenced the trajectory of Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century perhaps more than any other institution. The list of names of students or teachers populating this exceptional place between 1933 and 1957 reads like a Who’s Who of twentieth century art and design and, perhaps to a lesser extent, of the natural and social sciences as well. And yet, the show doesn’t focus much on the great names or the famous works they produced. It does not dwell on Buckminster Fuller’s invention of the geodesic dome there, or the school’s importance for the development of abstract expressionism, or the impact of the collaboration between Merce Cunningham and John Cage on contemporary art. Instead the exhibition demonstrates the institution’s appeal, built on an ethos of radically democratic interdisciplinarity, experiment, and exploration. Initially, it was not even conceived as an art school per se, but rather as a free educational institution where young men and women could develop the knowledge and skills that suited them best in their quest to make a meaningful contribution to society. As the show’s curators, Eugen and Gabriele Knapstein, write in the exhibition catalogue:
Black Mountain College has remained an exemplary institution to the present day and, particularly in our time of higher education reforms, which posit principles of economic efficiency as the sole measure of success, it is a counter-example of direct democratic praxis. (Blume et al. 2015: 14)
