ReVIEWING 15 Abstracts + Presenter Bios

Durational Performance, ongoing
lauri stallings, choreographer, and moving artists Zandia Covington and Mary Jane Pennington – the word for world is forest

Performance is a notion that names many things: movement, ephemera, body, research, sensation; and in 2025, performance also is an invocation of the transformative powers of presence: being there, being there for each other, as well as being there to be available, acknowledge, and care. stallings’ the word for world is forest is a choreographed piece connecting performative practices to the conference for ReVIEWING 15, and the context of Black Mountain College. Looking at performance as an alternative way of understanding and interacting with the world, a sort of micro-tuning “in/to,” her contribution offers a survey of its history while mapping it’s ongoing expansion into new forms in response to a transformed, entangled community.  the word for world is forest is a new performative action reflecting on the historical and contemporary relevance of performance through the notable connection of American artist Ursula K LeGuin and Black Mountain College artist Anni Albers, and their shared influence on creative practice and storytelling as a form of gathering, holding, and carrying forward knowledge and experiences.

While respecting the flow of ReVIEWING 15 morning to night, this ongoing action choreographed for moving artists Zandia Covington and Mary Jane Pennington takes the form of a movement choir, flocking patterns reminiscent of Georgia red-winged blackbirds, and a portal for spaces initially conceived as a place of experimentation and collaborative philosophy, where the spirits of Black Mountain College, and LeGuin and Albers might be recovered and awakened. Furthermore, it articulates an expanded vision of the concept of live action and/or other forms of agency – not as things fixed or bounded, but as a fluid space shaped by bodies, gestures, desires, and migrations – materials that record the land as lived and experienced through a dance, with all its impermanence, as the medium for generating a new gestural radical vocabulary, and matter, while engaging with Black Mountain College’s ecological, innovative, and historical issues.

SESSION NO. 1 – Room 206
Moderator: Margi Conrads

Ellen Levy: Ray Johnson Remembers and Remembers and Remembers Black Mountain

“I am going through the torture of memory of early black mt. mornings,” begins a 1981 letter from Ray Johnson to his friend and fellow Black Mountain College alumnus Norman Solomon. The artist was in a mood; still, from the moment when he left the College, Black Mountain figures in his work as a paradise lost. By mid-career, Johnson had also refashioned himself as a kind of historian, transmuting the poignant “torture of memory” into an antic visual-verbal account of the unstoppable metastasis of the postwar art world. But while the art world may have seen itself as moving ever onward and upward, Johnson’s art histories have a way of turning back on themselves, like the motif of a tail-swallowing ouroboros that features in his art. Another motif associated with Johnson’s time-bending impulse took the form of a little theater, an image traceable back to the production of Erik Satie’s Ruse of Medusa at Black Mountain that famously brought together John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and Buckminster Fuller in the summer of 1948.

For this presentation, I propose to tell the story of Ray Johnson’s actual and imaginary associations with Black Mountain College in his own style, beginning toward the end of his life and looping back and forth in time. This version of Johnson’s history with the College will draw on my account of the artist’s career in A Book About Ray (MIT Press, 2024). The presentation has two aims: (1) To convey a sense of the range and depth of BMC’s influence on Johnson’s art and thought over the course of his life, (2) To use Johnson’s ongoing engagement with his Black Mountain experience to illuminate his idiosyncratic approach to the representation of time in art.

Alex Landry: Paul Klee + Ray Johnson: TYPOFACTURE

Writing functions not only as language, but also as a visual and even tactile form. This idea was imparted by Josef Albers, a former colleague of Paul Klee at the Bauhaus, to his students at Black Mountain College, where Ray Johnson studied from 1945 to 1948. Albers introduced an exercise called “typofacture” in his design course, in which students created drawings that mimicked printed, diagrammatic, or handwritten text. He later described the concept in a 1965 essay: “The surface of a material shows us mainly the traces; so we speak of facture. The newspapers have typofacture. Hammered iron has a facture that is made of traces of the blow of the hammer. Other examples are a speckled wall, a spotted fabric, a raked garden path.” This attention to surface, materiality, and illusion left a lasting impression on Johnson, whose works (like Klee’s) frequently combine text and symbolic elements. Johnson’s fascination with Klee was shared by several students and faculty at BMC, including Ruth Asawa, Robert Motherwell, and Lorna Blaine Halper. In a 1947 letter to Blaine, Johnson enclosed a clipping of Klee’s Actor’s Mask (1924), with the postscript, “I send a Klee with cracks.” His admiration deepened into a recurring influence, visible in his expressive linework, symbolic motifs like arrows and spirals, and scattered homages across his collages, mail art, and promotional materials. Whereas Klee’s symbols often build self-contained, dreamlike worlds, Johnson’s marks accumulate journalistically, like field notes across a creative terrain.

SESSION NO. 2 – Room 207
Moderator: Cherry Saenger

Justin Childress: Walking the Field: Emergent Cartography through Olson’s Projective Verse

Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” posits that “one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception.” A chapter in my ongoing walking art project “Whispered Cartographies” adopts a similarly iterative approach to exploring two urban creeks in Dallas, Texas. Historically vital waterways, Turtle Creek is now known for its scenic beauty, while Mill Creek has been culverted and converted into an urban sewer. These creeks, once connected by natural water flow, now reflect divergent paths in urban planning and ecological impact, embodying the theme of “buried rivers as buried histories.”

An echo of Cage’s notion of “directions but no map,” this ambulatory project provides a psychogeographic framework for embodied navigation without dictating a fixed path. Olson’s assertion that “the line is the unit of the poem, not a single word but the breath” serves as an interpretive lens accompanying the walker, with the narrative form evolving from the ecological and historical content of the creeks in this moment. Topography as a poetic archive.

Inspired by a long line of “walking writers” and artists, I employ an autoethnographic awareness to document and interpret the immediate, lived experience of the landscape. This method of quiet performance aligns with Olson’s emphasis on “breath”, the spoken and experienced, while capturing the sensory, emotional, and ecological significance of these waterways from a single perspective. While the shadow of Mill Creek looms large, the focus of this specific audio/visual presentation will be on the Turtle Creek section of the project. By tracing this urban waterway and considering it both within the interpretive context of Projective Verse and the static semiotics of traditional maps, the project invites reflection on the lenses through which we can view a landscape, and what we might see when we look close enough.

Kate Tarlow Morgan: The Body is a House: Charles Olson’s Method for Proprioception

“Dance is an object and an action. It is simultaneously an object and an action. As a medium, it has the tremendous advantage — and limit — of the human body as its object, and that its action bucks that gravity, and can depend on it.” (Fr. Syllabary for a Dancer)

In 1975, I discovered Charles Olson’s book Proprioception and too, the title poem of what I call today a Manual for Living. The words “lean” and “yield” are used as a key to this primary response in the body. Proprioception, Olson maintains is the seal, the stamp, upon which each person’s life is impressed. And, to use Steve Paxton’s working phrase, “the small dance,” of place. In 2011, I found a short essay in the Olson’s archives at Storrs that had never been published, and yet it is a phenomenological gem concerning the nature of body awareness. “The Body is A House” considers a very important question for the dancer, which is: how to navigate the experience of one’s anatomy while in the process of navigating the anatomy of the experience. Or how know where we are. This consideration—of the experience and of the location—was and continues to be the subject of an entire field of study in what we now call Somatics. This is a field that subsumes the movement arts and sciences ranging from kinesiology to sports and from choreographic techniques to dance therapy. Olson’s work descends from a long history of somatic research. However, there may be no one, preceding or subsequently, better equipped to describe the nature of such an experience.

SESSION NO. 3 – Room 230
Moderator: Elliot Inman

gordon fung: A Heterotopic Theater from the Aborted Future: Perpetuating Black Mountain College’s Experimental Pedagogy through Cageian Theaters

Black Mountain College’s experimental pedagogy and communal environment sparked John Cage to embark on an influential exploration of experimental theater-making. Inspired by the interdisciplinary collaboration at the BMC, Cage’s pivotal work Theater Piece No. 1 (aka Untitled Event) (1952), credited as the first happening event, staged a point of departure that foretells the development of performance art, interdisciplinary performance, Fluxus, experimental theater, and particularly, happenings.

BMC’s unique collaborative, liberal, and progressive environment, alongside Cage’s interest in Zen Buddhism that began in the late 40s, provided an experimental soil that inspired and begot other future Cageian theatrical models, including Theater Piece (1960) and eventually more ambitious projects like Musicircus (1967) and HPSCHD (1969). As a discernible realization and visualization of progressive education and interdisciplinary collaboration at the BMC, this paper investigates how these models, alongside their inspirations and references, offer experimental pedagogical insights through Cage’s exploration of a multiplicity of centers, non-obstruction, and interpenetration in a theatrical context.

By generating an accessible and rhizomatic network that traverses time and space, Cageian theaters enable democratization and decentralization through utilizing simple instruction, happenings, and indeterminacy. His purposelessness and non-intentionality blossom into new ways of theater-making through Duchampian and Buddhist lenses.

This paper unearths the potential of Theater Piece No. 1 and its successor models as an open-source social project to provide educational value. Through interdisciplinary and indeterminate means in theater-making, these Cageian models serve to carry on BMC’s experimental educational legacy. By restoring collective, communal, and ritualistic performance practice, these models continue facilitating education in a wide range of subjects, including philosophy, virtue, morality, character building, peacemaking, and artmaking through experimental theaters.

Sean Lopez: Fluxus Propaganda

This paper examines the Fluxus art movement through the lens of propaganda theory, revealing the tension between art as ideological control and art as consciousness expansion. The paper argues that Fluxus embodied contradictory impulses—functioning simultaneously as revolutionary propaganda and as open-ended participatory art that resisted fixed meanings.

The essay traces two distinct trajectories within Fluxus. The first centers on founding member George Maciunas, who wielded the movement as a vehicle for anti-bourgeois propaganda, distributing manifestos and demanding ideological conformity from members. The paper positions Maciunas as embodying Jacques Ellul’s concept of “vertical propaganda,” using authoritarian tactics to promote his Marxist-tinged vision of destroying elite art institutions. This approach parallels Edward Bernays’ model of elite taste-making and Jason Stanley’s concept of undermining demagoguery.

In contrast, artists like George Brecht, Dick Higgins, and Jackson Mac Low created experiential works that functioned as “counterpropaganda.” Their event scores and Fluxkits used everyday materials to generate open-ended encounters between participants and mundane objects, expanding consciousness rather than imposing specific meanings. Drawing on Hannah Higgins’ phenomenological analysis, the paper argues these works operated in the liminal space between subject and object, encouraging participatory meaning-making rather than passive consumption.

The paper contextualizes these opposing approaches within broader propaganda theories from Chomsky, Debord, and others, examining how Fluxus both resisted and potentially reinforced systems of control. The paper concludes by addressing Fluxus’s complex legacy, acknowledging how its revolutionary techniques risk recuperation by the very spectacle they sought to critique, while maintaining that its participatory ethos continues to offer tools for expanding consciousness and resisting propagandistic control in contemporary art practice.

PERFORMANCE – Outdoor Patio
Robert Ladislas Derr: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (120 min)

Describing how the bourgeoisie preserve control Karl Marx wrote “all that is solid melts into air.” New becomes old before it can solidify. People constantly experience changing realities and truths. Uncertainty cloaks the facts.

Dressed in a suit and tie, similar to John Cage in his 1959 “Water Walk,” I sit on a 40″ x 18″ x 20″ bench of ice until at least half melted. Ideally, but doubtful, most of the ice will melt during the performance time. I intend to perform for at least 60 minutes, but am able to perform longer if time and ice allows. Accompanying the performance, a speaker will broadcast the sound of melting ice. In “Water Walk,” Cage created music from sounds of overlooked everyday water related items, while “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air’s” soundscape makes audible the almost imperceptible melody of melting ice.

During the durational performance, viewers are invited to partake too. Wet bottoms from the melting ice imprint and remind us of our experience of unrelenting change and ambiguity. An ephemeral trace, I will video each performer pushing their wet bottom into one of two cameras. A second video camera captures the overall performance. Together the footage will be used to create a future video.

PERFORMANCES – Manheimer Room
Jacqueline Calle with dancers Eliza Hyatt, Amanda Proffitt-Newcomb, Katia George, Leigha Hofmann, Kloe Tucker, Clara Zander, Cara Draz, Channing Dayton, Chloe Smith, Uriah Boyd, Nia Huell-Griffin, RJ Lee, 
and musician Maria Parrini: Suite in a Box (30 min).

This performance fuses illusion and choreography to explore Merce Cunningham’s chance-based procedures and their philosophical roots in the I Ching. Inspired by a stage illusion where 21 people emerge from an impossibly small box, the work playfully disorients spatial expectations while honoring Cunningham’s radical embrace of indeterminacy. A live folk musician scores the unfolding mystery, bridging embodied technique, ritual, and experimental form.

Doug Drewek + Raleigh Dailey: Emergent Form: An Electroacoustic Improvisation by Drewek & Dailey (30 min)

Veteran collaborators Dr. Doug Drewek (woodwinds) and Dr. Raleigh Dailey (piano and synthesizers) present a free electroacoustic improvisation that explores the interplay of acoustic and electronic sound, structured intuition, and the art of deep listening. With over two decades of shared performance history, the duo brings a refined sensitivity to spontaneous creation, allowing each gesture to emerge from mutual trust, attention, and responsiveness.

The performance draws inspiration from Black Mountain College’s legacy of cross-disciplinary experimentation, communal risk-taking, and the generative tension between tradition and innovation. The blend of woodwinds and piano with electronic textures offers a sound world that is both tactile and abstract—inviting audiences into a meditative and ever-shifting sonic environment. It honors Black Mountain’s spirit of risk, collaboration, and form that is both spontaneous and emergent.

Drewek and Dailey approach improvisation not only as a musical practice, but as a mode of being—open, responsive, and guided by process rather than outcome. Their teaching at the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts has included interdisciplinary collaborations with theater and movement, reinforcing their commitment to listening across boundaries and creating through dialogue. This performance reflects that same ethos of presence, risk, and mutual discovery.

WORKSHOP – Room 120
Kyriakos Apostolidis: Intra-space (90 min)

The movement workshop “Intra-space” introduces participants to body-based, ensemble performance. By encouraging improvisation, this all-levels workshop is designed to introduce a set of basic performance tools that enable participants to make use of their active attention, playfulness, and spontaneity in the creation of a sharing, emerging space of coexistence and co-creation. The workshop culminates in a collective action.

WORKSHOP – Room 205
Justin Tornow: On the collusion of performance and philosophy at BMC: Activating Dewey and the avant-gardes to address 21st century problems in education (90 min)

In the creative, experimental, multidisciplinary, and community spirit of Black Mountain College (BMC), this workshop is designed to contemplate a 21st century return to educational ideals realized by the College: Democratic values, the central role of the arts and performance, and the development of social consciousness.

Though largely absent in the institutional landscape of Western education today, these values had an immense impact on the perspectives and worldviews of BMC students, which reverberated in the arts and academia across the 20th century, far after the school’s closure in 1956. This workshop aims to harness the passions, insights, and experiences of all participants to co-create a lively and radically imaginative session of communal ideation capable of potentiating material shifts in education in our present. While education is a central concern for this session, being an educator is in no way a requirement to participate—in fact, the discussion will only be further enriched by a wide variety of participants, as it reflects the radical spirit of Deweyan democracy as founded on the interaction of different perspectives as a practice of “associated living” and social renewal.

To begin the session, I will briefly contextualize the relationship between democratic education and the arts as the social praxis at BMC as emergent from the intersection of the avant-gardist perspectives of BMC faculty and the educational philosophy of John Dewey, whose ideas were foundational to both the College’s mission and practices. Avant-gardist perspectives on performance at BMC—for instance, Schawinsky and Cage—will be discussed as closely related to Dewey’s philosophy of education. This introduction will serve as our springboard to contemplate how we define democracy, individual, society, and learning; how we might conceive of democratic education in 21st century contexts; and how democracy can interact with the purpose and function of an education that orbits around the arts. Where do democratic practices and art practices intersect? What values about education emerge at this intersection, and how might we re-integrate these into our present practices as artists, educators, scholars, and activists in the 21st century?

Together, we will move between utopian thinking and practical application as we consider the following: What needs and problems can these ideas address in 21st c. education? How might they be adapted and implemented in contexts of teaching and learning today? If we were to transform these ideas into practice, what might that look and feel like?

PANEL – Room 207
Performance and Black Mountain Poetics I
Moderator: Joseph Pizza

Jeff Gardiner – Olson and Dance

Olson’s ideas about dance as fundamental to an embodied poetics are clear in his review of Katherine Litz’s dancing at BMC. In his review, Olson writes “Litz has been one of the principal breakers of the “descriptive, narrative, thematic world…because of the incisive and thorough investigation she has devoted herself to of the kinetics of the body…” This statement reflects his focus on the body’s kinetics in “Projective Verse” and his use of breath to shape his poems. My talk will focus on Olson’s engagement with dancers and dance at BMC and how that engagement expressed itself in his poetics, essays, and poems during his years at BMC.

Jeff Hamilton – Charles Olson’s ‘for Robt Duncan . . . ‘ & Performing ‘the eternal events’ of Grief

The 2025 Black Mountain conference theme, “Performance at Black Mountain,” occasions my own wishing to unpack, in presentation, the performance of empathy in Olson’s verse letter to Duncan, which, at Louisville, in February 2024, I argued had been written in response to the death of Duncan’s mother, Minneha Symmes, in December 1960: “A mother,” the key line apothosizes, “is a hard thing to get away from.” What eternalizes the event of loss more than a poem’s constituting itself, not to say describing, performatively, as an action? Olson undertakes to enact a ceremony among “the eternal events . . . when species has replaced man” – a passage of the poem that Duncan surely drew from in writing his own essential autobiography, “The Truth and Life of Myth,” for the College of Preachers Conference in Washington D.C. in the week before the 1968 March on the Pentagon – in which Levertov and Duncan marched together. These personal and public investitures of grief require a close reading of Olson’s verse letter, that performs a ceremonial rite with his colleague Duncan.

Eireene Nealand – The Body as Polis

This paper will look at the structure of Olson’s 1965 “Proprioception” essay, considering some of the reasons why Olson mixes references to Jungian individuation with references to the muscle-and-tissue-based co-ordinative faculty, called proprioception. It suggests that the role to be performed by poets is that of balancing juxtaposed elements by creating images, or imaginations, as loose forms of coherence that bypass logocentric reasoning in favor of dynamic social embodiments.

WORKSHOP – Room 230
Max Bielenberg: Geometric Building with ExaPlex (90 min)

The ExaPlex workshop allows participants to explore geometric concepts through physical play and building. Participants can work by themselves or in small groups of 4-5 people. The workshop follows this general structure:
1. Introduction – Brief introduction into ExaPlex and the workshop structure and activities
2. Building Time – Hands-on construction with guidance as needed
3. Sharing – Groups show what they’ve made and talk about what they learned

Participants can choose from several workshop activities:
1. Geometric Shape Library – Use a collection of examples showing geometric shapes that participants can build. These include regular polyhedra, lattices, and other interesting shapes.
2. Challenge Cards – Pick from 36 cards that prompt building projects related to specific themes, such as “Build Domes” or “Build Platonic Solids.”
3. Workshop Exercises – Several structured team activities are available:

Speed Builds – Try to build complex shapes like buckyballs or honeycomb structures as quickly as possible, working together as a team.
Structural Tests – Make shapes that can withstand physical forces, like towers that resist shaking.
Math Challenges – Build shapes based on certain mathematical concepts, such as building the family of convex deltahedra, finding the smallest possible chiral shape, or building “snarks”.
Rule-Based Building – Follow simple connection rules (like “3-way pieces can only connect to 4-way pieces”) and see what kinds of structures emerge.
Game Creation – Devise multi-player games using the ExaPlex pieces as game elements
Architectural Models – Design and build pavilions or other scaled architectural models.

4. Free Building – Participants who prefer to explore on their own can build whatever interests them.

As the workshop facilitator, I introduce ExaPlex and the activities and materials, guide participants and teams that need attention, provide background information, facts, knowledge and tips, and bring books, magazines, images, tools and accessories that might be useful. The workshop works for different age groups and experience levels – there is enough content and flexibility to adapt exercises and timings on the fly if needed.

4:30 – 5:45pm
Manheimer Room
WELCOME – Jeff Arnal (Executive Director, BMCM+AC) and Kim Van Noort, Chancellor, UNC Asheville
KEYNOTE PRESENTATION – Debra McCall: Steps to Modernity: Reconstructing the 1920s Bauhaus Dances of Oskar Schlemmer

Debra McCall is a dance historian, choreographer, Certified Movement Analyst, and performer best known for her reconstructions of Oskar Schlemmer’s 1920s Bauhaus Dances. Recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the NEH, she also received the Rome Prize in Design from the American Academy in Rome and a Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award for her documentation of medieval reliefs of sacred dancers at the Thillai Nataraja Temple in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu. McCall served on the graduate faculties of New York University and Pratt Institute where she was Mellon Lecturer. Her Bauhaus work has been presented in a variety of venues including Performa 09, Artissima 17 Torino, and Harvard University’s The Bauhaus and Harvard: 100 years.

7:00 – 9:00pm – RECEPTION for POINTS IN SPACE: Performance at Black Mountain College exhibition
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (120 College St., downtown Asheville)

SESSION NO. 1 – Room 205

Moderator: Mary Holden Thompson

Joseph Bathanti: Outside Inside: The Prison Writing and Teaching of Fielding Dawson

This presentation underscores Fielding Dawson’s niche as a decided stylist for his entire publishing life, but also how his sudden immersion into prison teaching nudged him toward conventional narrative strategies. While retaining the voice and style of his earlier work, his prison fiction became much more linear and more plot-driven, less fractured, less collage-like, and more concerned with conventional plot. After his epiphanic teaching stint at Attica in 1984 (his first foray into a prison), Dawson experienced a kind of rebirth as a writer. His prison writing became overtly political and, indeed, his own life became much more devoted to the cause of and advocacy for prison reform. In addition, this period, post-Attica, also launched his career as a teacher – something he’d done little of in any sustained way – and specifically as a prison writing teacher of note. What’s more, he also published pieces about teaching in prison, and developed a particular pedagogy, congenial to teaching creative writing in prisons. In his “Defined as a Genre,” a kind of primer for teaching in prisons, Dawson contends that prison writing constitutes “a genre all its own: dynamic, expressive, compelling, that should be recognized, and have a place in modern literature.”

Tymek Woodham: Gothic Black Mountain: abject matter in the memoirs of Michael Rumaker and Fielding Dawson

Of all the aesthetics circulating through the institutional memory of Black Mountain College, the Gothic is hardly a familiar touchstone. Functionalism, abstraction, modernism, atonality, pragmatism—these are not conceptual containers roomy enough for werewolves or vampires, nor would they suffer gargoyles perched on their meticulously crafted lines. This paper, however, attends to narrative accounts of the College that use Gothic imagery to represent the pedagogical encounter. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of ‘the abject’, I contend that memoirs by Michael Rumaker and Fielding Dawson seize upon what is ‘jettisoned’ by the forward push of progressive education, shining a light on contradictions that both threaten and constitute Black Mountain mythologies.

In these accounts, the Appalachian landscape is an eerie incursion into a besieged community; a cipher for repressed legacies of violence that subtend the attempt to ground a more democratic national imaginary. If Xanti Shawinsky once described College pedagogy as ‘taking a crack at the whole man,’ Charles Olson’s vampiric appetites bring the implicit horror of ‘total education’ to the fore, as Oedipal crises interrupt tales of holistic personal renewal. Ghosts and gore haunt Rumaker’s and Dawson’s narratives: both fascinated and repulsed by sick bodies, rejected manuscripts and libidinal confusion, their Gothic lexicons deepen and undermine organicist models of individual development.

By attending to these tropes, I propose ‘Gothic Black Mountain’ not as a unified aesthetic movement but as a tonal frequency that permeates the College’s claims to futurity. I want to ask: what counter-narratives emerge when we exhume the horrific, the repressed or the abjected?; how do fear and trembling trouble the role of the senses in forging artistic, autonomous individuals?; and to what extent does a Gothic Black Mountain help us understand the latent perturbations of American post-war national consciousness?

SESSION NO. 2 – Room 206

Moderator: Thomas E. Frank

Jason Miller: Poet Langston Hughes’s Unknown 1949 Visit to Black Mountain College 

“Negro History Week” of 1949 brought poet Langston Hughes to Winston-Salem, Asheville, and Wilson, NC.  Hughes’s undocumented visit to Black Mountain College during that same trip in February was critical to his first meeting with then 16-year-old Eunice Waymon (before she became known to the world as musical performer Nina Simone). Using archival notes from Hughes’s personal papers, this presentation details every aspect of Hughes’s stay, including the personalities he engaged with, the books and song lyrics he donated to the College, and the performance of his poetry on campus. Widening College history, Hughes met and visited extensively with Mel Mitchell, artist Ulrich Heinemann-Rufer, and Dolores Fullman (the only black student studying at the College that year). The poet was so impressed, he shared his praise of the College in one of his national newspaper columns published in The Chicago Defender.

SESSION NO. 3 – Room 207

Moderator: Nan Zander

Maurice Moore: Drawing Wit Sound (feat. We Don’t Owe Yall Androgyny In De Breaks)

Dis ReVIEWING of sonic poetry begins wit sound, and we beez explorin de generative potential of de silence, de gaps, and de interludes as inspired by John Cage’s 4’33”. Shout out Fred Moten and Stefano Harney!

Audiences will be treated to engaging wit sonic poems created from numerous performances and collaborations where technologies were integrated with human bod odi odi odi odi odi odi ies, projectors, computer programs, and interactive objects to challenge assumptions about the roll Euphoria, Indifference, and Dysphoria play in queer performance art? Silence = Death…Does Silence = Death? Can Euphoria, Indifference, and Dysphoria thrive in the Breaks? Are questions dat drive dis creative research. For instance, my visual poem “Da Blacker de Nonbinary Da Sweeter De Juice (Feat. Euphoria & Are You One of Those THEY/THEMS?)” was rendered by incorporating elements from performance-drawing, gesture drawing, and some automatism practices; to create immersive environments and engaging experiences relating to race, gender identity, and gender expression coupled with black hxstories and cultural diasporic traditions in Amerikkkca.

My pieces put into practice some of these theories extrapolated from studio arts, performance studies, queer of color critique and Africana Studies, synthesizing different dialects of innovative visual languages. Moreover, challenging conventional creative practices & scores by infusing dem wit quare aesthetics i.e. call and response, reading, throwing shade, and African American Vernacular/Gestural English (AAVE) etc. By engaging wit these modes/genres thru Practice as Research is carried out by de remixing and sampling gleaned from creative arts research, Africana Studies continues to broaden mark-making in my research.

Sol Swan Tuite: The Black Mountain Bricoleurs as a site of trans resistance to the Reinvention of Gender Binaries

Black Mountain College was a unique space where its community of bricoleurs gathered from what was available to dream and created what was possible. This was not a theoretical project so much as it was a practical necessity and, as such, the history of Black Mountain College (BMC) bricoleurs offers a path for political resistance in a graceless age of cynicism and degradation. For the purposes of queer philosophy and specifically the trans philosophical project– that is the project of emancipating trans existence from the shackles of gender prejudice– the BMC bricoleurs are a model for overcoming everyday repression of gender diversity.

This paper proposes to examine several performative and literary artists as creators, what I call the Black Mountain College bricoleurs, who gathered new insights from their inheritances for the purposes of new freedoms in a world of oppression. Specifically, this paper examines the ways in which these bricoleurs engaged discrimination of sexual orientation. First, this paper considers Robert Duncan’s 1959 retrospective of his paper “The Homosexual in Society” (1944), which highlights similarities and differences between queer and straight love. I argue that this balancing act between similarity and difference remains a crucial site of resistance for contemporary trans activists fighting the reinvention of gender binaries.

This paper then surveys a number of BMC bricoleurs (Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and Williams) with an eye for retrieving their insights for contemporary trans politics. Notably, I argue that BMC bricoleurs articulated a model for resisting the politics of marginalization. They did this by creating spaces where self-expression and communal recognition were the norms, showing how the reimagining of creative possibility creates a transgressive model for resisting the reinvention of gender oppression in contemporary politics.

SESSION NO. 4 – Room 230

Moderator: Blaise deFranceaux

Dominika Tylcz: Embodying Space: Ruth Asawa and Modern Dance

PERFORMANCES – Manheimer Room

Caitlyn Schrader (and collaborators of liminality project): Temporary Performance Assembly: navigating encounters with light, sound, and movement (30 min)

This is a time-based, performative experiment and multi-sensory, spontaneous composition where attention becomes the compass for collaborative choice-making bringing together dance artists at the intersection of body and object evoking interplay of movement, light, and sound. Composing from the inside, what is presented are seamless artistic mediums, akin to BMC’s legacy. What transpires is serious play.

James Belflower + Devin King: I Have Done Nothing to Ring Out (30 min)

This performance arose out of a discussion group pairing poets adjacent to the Black Mountain School with seminal sound studies texts to theorize the sonic materialism within Black Mountain poetry, field poetics, and serial poetry. Our live performance titled “I Have Done Nothing to Ring Out,” weaves text and sound together to explore the importance of voice and sonic materialism to Robin Blaser’s early theorization of serial poetry through his concept of the “Holy Forest.” Blaser’s early series employ many literary/audio motifs and often portray them as non-verbal materialisms (tics, pops, and knocks), which destabilizes lyric identities founded on an identifiable speaking subject. This auditory materialism is contiguous with the development of Pierre Schaeffer’s concept of the “sound object,” an entity that arises in the experience of listening and often measures the uniqueness of the event. Taken together, the “sound object” for Blaser, enacts “a materialism that acknowledges the substance of objects as temporal processes, autonomous from human intervention and perception, but which become real for the subject through his/her temporal process of being substance simultaneously with other substances” (Voegelin n.p.) Our performance animates this sonic materialism by collaging spoken word, the auditory imagery of Blaser’s early poetry, and the vocal grain of tape hiss and room noise from his interviews in The Astonishment Tapes.

WORKSHOP – Room 120

Chris Yon + Taryn Griggs: Let’s Roll! A workshop in adapting chance operations for collaborative group dance making for movers of all abilities (90 min)

Let’s Roll! A workshop in adapting chance operations for collaborative group dance making for movers of all abilities facilitated by Taryn Griggs and Chris Yon. Participants will collectively discover and explore rules of indeterminacy. Utilizing dice, paper, and pencil we will generate movement, sonic, and visual environments; and arrive together at an aleatory, unpredictable group performance.

WORKSHOP – Room 205

Derek Fenner: Talking Black Mountain from the Inside Out (90 min)

This session uses arts-based research and performance strategies inspired by Gabriel Orozco’s Mirror Critiques to help participants speak from inside artworks by Black Mountain College artists. By connecting lived experience with visual culture, the session fosters deep reflection, personal insight, and new ways of engaging with art.

LISTENING SESSION – Room 206

Performing Black Mountain Poetry: A Roundtable Discussion of Early Recordings

Moderator: Jeff Davis

Seth Forrest, Jeff Gardiner, Eireene Nealand, and Joseph Pizza

In this roundtable discussion, members of the Charles Olson Society will play and discuss three early recordings made in Asheville in 1954 by Black Mountain poets. Moderated by Jeff Davis, longtime producer and host of WordPlay on AshevilleFM, the discussion will focus on the practical and theoretical implications of these early recordings for our understanding Black Mountain poetics and aesthetics, as well as look ahead to the various multi-ethnic reading series, recording ventures, and performance art that adopted and adapted such perspectives in succeeding decades.

WORKSHOP – Room 207

Justin William Evans: Writing Through Mesostics – An exploration of a method for turning prose into poetry and music, as developed by John Cage (90 min)

John Cage’s “mesostic” poems use chance operation to rearrange words from longer texts into poems that leave room for the music of phonetic sound. We’ll discuss the rules and potential opportunities of this form of chance writing, which impedes the natural impulses of the writer and, simultaneously, provides choices that encourage fluidity and music. Participants will create and share their work while discussing challenges, discoveries, and potential performance techniques.

WORKSHOP – Room 230

Jess Peri: Cameraless Photography at Black Mountain (90 min)

In this workshop we will create camerless images using only chemicals, light, and your own artistic voice while also learning how the Black Mountain College leaned into its experimental potential. The history of cameraless photography is one that is not often talked about and is eclipsed by camera-made images. Come explore this fringe use of the photographic medium and expand the how you think of photography.

1:00 – 1:45pm

Manheimer Room – FEATURED PRESENTATION

Jeff Arnal will talk about performance at Black Mountain College and the exhibition Points in Space at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

PERFORMANCES – Manheimer Room

Kate Tarlow Morgan: Down 2 Bone or Proprioception (7min)

“Down 2 Bone,” is a 6-minute choreographic lecture on the roots of “proprioception,” as well as to demonstrating the perceived experience of it. The dance draws from the basic neurological movement patterns, while Kate shares the story of the discovery of “proprioception” from the 17th to the 20th centuries written in the canon of  “depth-sensibility,” a phrase coined by American poet, Charles Olson in his poem to Ed Dorn, titled, Proprioception (1965).

Emily Hay: Flutist/Vocalist and Friends Improvisational Music Performance (30min)

Emily Hay and Friends will perform improvisational music, melding free jazz, electronics, contemporary classical and world music idioms into startling explorations of sound, humor, and human interaction.

PERFORMANCE– Room 120

Sean Lopez: The Light Keeper (30 min)

“The Light Keeper” explores our responsibility to protect the light within ourselves—the unconditional love and essential worth we must guard against a changing, violent world. A costumed performer embodies a mythological lighthouse keeper through projection-mapped screens displaying seascapes and mythological imagery. The lighthouse represents our inner sentinel, standing vigil between our authentic selves and external darkness, maintaining hope and self-compassion despite surrounding chaos.

SESSION NO. 1 – Room 205

Moderator: Kira Houston

Holly Filsinger: From the Collection: Searching for Faith Murray Britton

Faith Murray Britton, who attended Black Mountain College in the early to mid 1940’s, is likely most known for her work The Weaver (1942) on the weaving workshop door, a fixture of the Lake Eden campus, and as a student assistant to Jean Charlot’s 1944 murals Inspiration and Knowledge. The Faith Murray Britton Collection within BMCM+AC’s permanent collection, comprises decades of artwork both during and after Britton’s time both as student at BMC. Britton’s work provides rich insights into the artistic life and career of one of the women of Black Mountain College.

William Graham: Bolotowsky: Connections, Commonalities and Conflicts

Ilya Bolotowsky, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists and neo-plasticist artist, taught at Black Mountain College (BMC) from mid 1946 to early 1948 in place of Josef Albers who was on sabbatical. Given the brevity of his time there, Bolotowsky is perhaps not as well known as other faculty. And if he is known, it is perhaps likely for some of the more critical comments he made about BMC. Or the fact that after Albers returned, Bolotowsky did not leave immediately, and there was conflict between the two. Since much of the conflict originated in very different pedagogical approaches, it is not surprising the there was also well-reported tension between students who preferred one or the other.

At the same time, there were connections amongst people and commonalities in art between them and others. The divisions between Bolotowsky and Albers and amongst their respective students was not entirely as hard and fast as might be perceived. Further, much of what Bolotowsky had to say about BMC was far more nuanced, perceptive and positive than is often apparent from the few snippets generally seen in secondary sources. It is my intent to present a somewhat wider view of Ilya Bolotowsky at BMC and beyond, in particular through the voices and art of various students.

WORKSHOP – Room 206

Drew Sisk: Seed Change: Reimagining Black Mountain through AI and Typography (90 min)

In this workshop, participants will investigate the legacy and mythology of Black Mountain College through the use of artificial intelligence. Participants will use archival images and texts from the Black Mountain College Museum archives, remix them with the assistance of AI, and generate a fully functioning font by the end of the workshop. In this way, the archive becomes the seeds from which our typeface will grow through the care and tending of the workshop participants.

SESSION NO. 2 – Room 207

Moderator: Patrick Kukucka

Nicholas Boone: Jorie Graham, Contemporary Black Mountain Poet

This paper will draw upon my forthcoming book, Understanding Jorie Graham (University of South Carolina Press) to explain how the legacy of Black Mountain poetry is alive in the poetry of Jorie Graham. Most attention will be given to the maxims of Olson’s “Projective Verse,” but I will also draw upon interviews in which Graham mentions Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan as influences. Graham’s turn towards environmentalism in her later works also mirrors many concerns of other Black Mountain poets, such as Larry Eigner.

The presentation will draw on a couple of well-known poems from Graham, such as “The Dream of the Unified Field” and “Deep Water Trawling,” as well as some of her statements from interviews to provide evidence of her deep engagement with Black Mountain, or projectivist, poetics. Graham, whose poems are often featured in the New Yorker and other major venues, is one of the most decorated living American poets, having won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996, The Forward Prize in 2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award in 2017.

Hannah Mathews: Following in Denise Levertov’s “Footprints”

Long associated with Black Mountain College, Denise Levertov is a figure whose poetics and work are relevant especially today. This project proposes that “Footprints,” an often overlooked collection, displays Levertov’s core poetic principles of compassion in constant tension with a desire felt often by many today to isolate in order to avoid interacting with the horrors and contradictions of the world. Pulling from her own definitions of her poetic technique in “A Poet in the World” as well as biographical material, this paper focuses on “Footprints” as a recognition of her own struggles to write and exist in accordance with her poetics. Following the Black Mountain tradition of work that is deeply collaborative, Levertov strings together a loose narrative of resisting apathy by relying on communities past, current, and future.

Devin King: Maverick American Composers in the Correspondence between Ronald Johnson and Jonathan Williams

In his correspondence with Jonathan Williams, Ronald Johnson describes attending two musical dramas by maverick American composers: The Bewitched by Harry Partch and Young Caesar by Lou Harrison. While the timing is not exact, the dates of these performances nevertheless generally mark the beginning and end of Johnson’s close poetic confidence and romantic relationship with Williams: Johnson sees Bewitched in the midst of his late–1950s entry—guided by Williams—into New York’s literary and performance scene, and Johnson describes seeing Young Caesar in an important letter where he argues for the new poetics that would push him beyond Williams’s mentorship and into his mature poetry. This paper explores these biographical facts in consort with analysis of the two musical dramas to place Johnson and Williams’s poetic and romantic relations in tandem with advances in post-Cageian musical drama, from Partch’s important breakthrough with an evening-length piece for dance, to Harrison’s realization of what could arguably be described as the first opera on an explicitly queer subject.

SESSION NO. 3 – Room 230

Moderator: Margot Ammidown

Thomas E. Frank: Louis Adamic and the Struggle for American Democracy

No writer did more to advance the repute of Black Mountain College than Louis Adamic, whose profile of the college, “Education on a Mountain,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1936. The article takes on a deeper relevance in the context of Adamic’s passion for democracy. An immigrant from Slovenia, champion of Tito’s Yugoslavia, and vigorous opponent of fascism, Adamic was a tireless advocate for his vision of America as a multi-ethnic society of equality among peoples. His untimely death under mysterious circumstances followed years of FBI investigations and threats from the Stalinist regime. His exemplary courage is today more timely than ever.

David Peifer: The Story of a Black Mountain College Mathematics Student

Peter Nemenyi began studies at Black Mountain College in 1947 and graduated in 1950, working with the mathematician Max Dehn. At every stage of his life, Peter was dramatically impacted by world events. He is a Forest Gump type of character, showing up and witnessing firsthand the most important events of his lifetime. He was born in Berlin in 1927 at the flash point of the chaos and war soon to overtake the world. He spent the war years as a child refugee in Europe separated from his parents. Peter came to Black Mountain College to study mathematics and ended up in the middle of a modern revolution in the arts. In 1963, he earned a PhD from Princeton University working with John Wilder Tukey, one of the most distinguished statisticians of the twentieth century. During this period, he became involved in the civil rights movement. He taught at two historically black colleges, worked in Mississippi on voter registration drives, and participated in marches and sit-ins. He was in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, days after John Lewis and others were beaten at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Peter’s life was tied up with significant events from the Cold War. He is probably the half-brother of the chess master Bobby Fischer. As the Reagan administration was caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal, from 1979-1983, Peter was working for the Sandinista government, in Nicaragua, as a statistician. Peter’s story gives a distinctive perspective on these important cultural events. To have a full understanding of Black Mountain College, it is important to include stories of those individuals whose interests lie outside of the arts.

Clare Ivey Colton: Interloper at Black Mountain College

Why would a young nurse, with fulltime position at Highland Hospital, spend weekends at BMC for nine years? What attracted her?

1. The focus on the arts at BMC

Mary Parker had a “dream job” at the hospital with duties that sometimes included taking her patients on trips around the world to tour, visit art museums, and hear famous musicians. She learned to love the arts and absorbed art history. In her spare time, she painted. When she was back in Asheville in 1933, she learned of the new college and began visiting. She had fallen in love with much of the great art of the world in museums. But at BMC she saw art being created and heard it discussed by its creators. She observed people making a living at art and finding fulfillment. It was this exposure that drove her to leave nursing, enroll in art school, teach art and art history, and paint, often exhibiting in the Asheville area. Although Mary never enrolled in BMC due to her fulltime nursing position, and was therefore only an interloper, her experiences at BMC changed her life.

2. The Quaker practices and format of governance at the College

Raised in Cuba by missionary parents, Mary Parker was rejecting much of the conservative teaching of her family and seeking a personal spirituality. The democratic governance of BMC, modeled in part after Quaker practices, intrigued and attracted her. Years later she became a Quaker.

3. The environment was familiar

The manual labor involved and the economical use of land to produce food were familiar to Mary, and she believed in their value. At Highland Hospital where Mary worked, manual labor, including growing food, was part of the therapy for patients. Staff worked alongside patients in a garden and farm.

PERFORMANCE INSTALLATION – Outdoor Patio

Claire Elizabeth Barratt (CillaVee) with Sara Baird: The Rhizomatic Collective Unconscious Dreamcatcher – a Motion Sculpture Movement Installation durational performance and evolving sculpture (90 min)

Originally commissioned and created for the Black Mountain College Museum’s {Re}HAPPENING 2024 at Lake Eden, The Rhizomatic Collective Unconscious Dreamcatcher is a performance installation that draws on the legacy of weaving that Anni Albers brought to Black Mountain College. This work explores the crucial networks and systems of unification and connection in the natural environment and in human society by comparing mycorrhizal fungi with the neural networks of the mind and our Collective Unconscious – its expression in archetypal myths and dreams.

The influence of weaving begins in the structure of the Dreamcatcher as a sculptural textile object and extends into the performative weaving of connections between art object, performers and audience.

Audience members are invited to interact – as guided by the performers.

SESSION NO. 1 – Manheimer Room

Moderator: Heather South

Lexie Harvey: Examining Otherwise: A Close Reading of Tommy Jackson’s Cigarette-Paper Programs at Black Mountain College

What can two cigarette-paper programs reveal about performance at Black Mountain College? What does their materiality—translucent, fragile, intended for brief use—tell us about authorship, participation, and presence? And how might these small artifacts prompt us to rethink the relationships among art, craft, and performance at BMC, as well as how each is created, archived, remembered, or forgotten?

This presentation centers on two ephemeral programs letterpress-printed by student Tommy Jackson for a July 4, 1953 musical performance. Meant to be passed hand-to-hand, pocketed, and ostensibly consumed, these delicate cigarette papers now stand as quiet yet potent objects within BMC’s archive. What happens when we attend to them closely—not simply as documentation but as material performances in their own right?

Drawing on material culture studies, queer theory, and speculative archival methodologies, I ask: What kinds of performance are encoded in paper, ink, and typography? How do dynamics shift when a performance includes—or is shaped by—printed ephemera? What does it mean to be “at” an event but remain outside its official narrative?

This talk also engages the Albers’s dismissal of what they called “ashtray art”—a term used to disparage decorative or seemingly trivial craftwork as lacking seriousness or rigor. Jackson’s fragile, playful ephemera occupies this ambivalent space—neither fully embraced by fine art nor easily dismissed—inviting us to reconsider how value and seriousness have been assigned within BMC’s interdisciplinary experiment.

Rather than seeking to recover Jackson’s biography, this presentation opens a space for archival hospitality, inviting care for what is lost or overlooked and as a response to archival gaps—not a call to fill them, but to linger with their uncertainty. In this way, the smallest artifacts lead us to generous questions: Who else was there? What else might performance look like? How do we remember in ways that are attentive and kind?

David Silver: Medea, the last performance at Black Mountain College

Medea at Kolchis: The Maiden Head, or Medea, was the last play performed at Black Mountain College. Written by Robert Duncan and performed by students Louis Marbury, Eloise and Don Mixon, Ann Simone, Erik Weinberger, and John Wieners and drama professor Wes Huss, Medea was staged twice in the classroom on the lower level of the Studies Building on the evenings of August 29 and 30, 1956. Within a week, the college closed. Medea, as Eloise Mixon writes, “was the last play produced at Black Mountain College, the last work of art.”

I propose a talk that traces the three iterations of Medea. The first, as already briefly described, was the play written, rehearsed, and performed at Black Mountain College in late August, 1956. The second Medea was a collectively imagined sequel, discussed and dreamed about by theater students and faculty during early September, 1956. The third Medea was Medea II, the sequel written by Duncan, directed by Huss, and sporadically rehearsed in the Playhouse in San Francisco, where the entire original cast was now living, in fall 1958. Although Medea II was never performed, it served as a spark for the great migration from Black Mountain College to San Francisco.

This talk draws heavily from multiple interviews from the Mary Emma Harris and Black Mountain College Project, Inc. Oral History Collection at Appalachian State University Libraries’ Special Collections and Eloise Mixon’s unpublished essay-memoir, “Robert Duncan’s Medea at Black Mountain,” found within the Jess Papers, 1941-2004 in UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. It is part of a larger research project titled Black Mountain College in San Francisco.

Andrew Kohn: Wolpe and his ghostwriter

After WWII and under the encouragement of the G.I. Bill, many artists, including composers Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland, addressed an audience of non-specialists to explain their art. Black Mountain College professor Charles Olson did the same, and later so would Josef Albers and M.C. Richards. In this cultural situation, and under pressure from the presence and popularity of John Cage, Black Mountain’s new music faculty member, Stefan Wolpe, gave a series public lectures on his artistic methods: he delivered one on rhythm (lost) and “Thoughts on Pitch” in the summer of 1952, and “Any Bunch of Notes” in the fall of 1953. In between these events, Wolpe delivered an essay, believed to be his manuscript entitled “Any Bunch of Notes,” in early February, 1953. This essay, however, had been written by music critic Boris De Schloezer as “The Way of Understanding” and had been published twice: in Modern Music (1930) and in a 1937 collection of essays, Schoenberg. Comparison shows Wolpe’s minor revisions to accommodate the interests of his BMC audience. The clarification of this source explains features in the Wolpe essay which are otherwise jarring. The content of De Schloezer’s essay is manifestly congruent with Wolpe’s own creative outlook. As for the reason for Wolpe’s appropriation, this remains unknown; the event is most odd.

SESSION NO. 2 – Room 120

Moderator: Nan Zander

Justin William Evans: The Influence of Black Mountain College on American Film

The Influence of Black Mountain College on American FilmThis paper outlines some of the influences on American film which moved through Black Mountain College. As a communicator of modernist practices and pedagogy, a famously collaborative environment, and as a space profoundly tied to its setting, BMC contains a constellation of precedents and alternatives for filmmakers who’ve diverted from the focus on film as text and embraced a greater fluidity between recorded media, place, and event. Although alumni like Stan Vanderbeek and Arthur Penn are the most direct examples of this influence, it’s worth additionally exploring the varieties of articulation and performances related to awareness of medium and theatrical space which were amplified by this College in Western North Carolina, the relationship of its artists to later Neo-Dada experimentations with new technology in video, and the importance of these ideas to a medium so tied to our everyday lives.

Deborah Randolph: Parrott’s Culinary Choreography: Black Mountain College Alumni and Faculty in Santa Fe

This paper will explore how the relationships and ideas formed at Black Mountain College (BMC) reverberated beyond the campus, specifically to Santa Fe, New Mexico, beginning in the 1950s. The transformative BMC experience has been documented in memoirs and interviews, conjuring up dining hall discussions, conversations on mountain hikes, impromptu performances, and late night arguments about art and life. Cynthia Homire wrote, “I have…washed the floor Merce Cunningham danced on… jitterbugged with Rauschenberg, pointed out morels to John Cage… All these things happen if you are there for them.”

These encounters led to collaborations and more conversations well beyond BMC, even to the high desert of New Mexico. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Santa Fe was drawing artists, BMC alumni and faculty among them. Three alumni, Jorge Fick and Cynthia Homire, and faculty member Robert Chapman Turner, settled for a time on Canyon Road just as it was beginning to thrive as an arts district. They lived just blocks from weaver Alice Kagawa Parrott, who was renowned for her hospitality. She offered food or a steaming pot of tea to entice conversation and hosted guests, such as Trude Guermonprez and Kay Sekimachi, at her home while they conducted workshops in Santa Fe. Her dinner parties provided artists time to reconnect and recharge. Those same discussions, conversations, mountain hikes and arguments about art continued from BMC days. Patsy Lynch Wood wrote about the BMC experience as, “learning a process to compose our own lives.” Alice Kagawa Parrott provided the culinary choreography to continue that quest.

SESSION NO. 3 – Room 205

Moderator: Ralph Burns 

Charlott Greub: A Work-Life Learning Model in Art and Architecture Education: The Experimental House of the Bauhaus School in Weimar and the Jalowetz House at BMC

The aim of this presentation is to explore the relationship between the concept of work-life learning education when associated with the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College as an aesthetic program. Two case studies will be presented, the Experimental House am Horn and the Jalowetz House, to also address the different conditions under which they have been created such as – architect, construction, social environment, cultural context, political era, etc., that might be reasons why these prototypes were never put into mass production of low-cost housing.

The Haus Am Horn by Georg Muche and Walter Gropius built in 1923 was known as an “experimental house” (or, in German, Versuchshaus) in order to emphasize its essential exemplary function as prototype or template for a new kind of mass-produced, low-cost, and energy-efficient single-family housing unit for an entire settlement or housing estate cooperative in Weimar, Germany. As a prototype, showcased during the Bauhaus exhibition in August 1923, the Haus Am Horn was intended to serve as an educational project in scale 1:1 to teach its students and prepare its visitors as well as prospective residents for new forms of the emergent realities of modern life.

In 1934, architect and Black Mountain professor A. Lawrence Kocher had advocated for Gropius to come to the U.S. to teach. In 1937, Gropius was offered a position at Harvard, and Kocher recommended that Black Mountain College hire him and Marcel Breuer to design its new campus. When their services proved costly, Kocher took on the task himself, designing various facilities including the Jalowetz House, built in 1940 with the assistance of faculty and students in the construction process as a design-built project where educational objectives (Dewey’s “learning by doing”) are interwoven with architectural practice.

Drew Sisk: Werklehre: Material, Mythology, and Memory from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain

In this paper I investigate the legacy and mythology of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. We find ourselves in a time of immense social, political, and cultural tension—perhaps another Bauhaus-Black Mountain moment. Artificial intelligence is disrupting the creation and consumption of media. The way we see and perceive images and texts and our understanding of materiality is fundamentally shifting. Our engagement with the mythology of our predecessors is changing as well.

Through a combination of field research conducted in Germany and North Carolina and a series of multimedia studio projects, I trace the footsteps of the faculty members of the Bauhaus who fled Nazi Germany to help launch Black Mountain College in the 1930s. I see parallels to the present, in which our access to and understanding of art and design history and our cultural memory face the dual threats of rising global fascism and an archive compromised by AI.

While AI undoubtedly problematizes cultural memory and production, it can also be used to critically engage our current moment, exposing the absurdity and banality of these newly-accessible technologies. Josef Albers referred to his basic design curriculum using the German word Werklehre, focusing on economy of means and using “well-known materials [to] seek to find untried possibilities.” In this way, artificial memory and digital gestures become materials for experimentation in a new era of human-machine collaboration.

SESSION NO. 4 – Room 206

Moderator: Margaret Curtis

Barbara von Bechtolsheim: The Summer of 1945 at Black Mountain College

This paper creates an imaginary encounter of three prominent expatriates whose paths crossed at Black Mountain College during the summer of 1945: Josef Albers, Bauhaus artist and chair of the art department at Black Mountain College, architect Walter Gropius, Bauhaus founder and frequent lecturer at Black Mountain College, and Hugo Kauder, composer-in-residence at Black Mountain College, musician, and philosopher. All three of them found an intellectual home and inspiration at this special remote college. All three of them wanted to return to the basics in their field. Moreover, they all connected art and real life, which is why their ideas resonated with the ethos of Black Mountain College. In doing so, they developed theories of aesthetics for their field. In addition to examples of their respective artwork as it relates to Black Mountain College a comparison of their aesthetics, ethics, and educational and artistic goals highlights how Black Mountain College was a hub of creative innovation at the time.

Elliot Inman: The 1948 Performance of Satie’s Le Piège de Méduse as a Prototype for the Happenings of 1952 and Beyond

The performance of Erik Satie’s play Le Piège de Méduse at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1948 was more than just a performance of an obscure one-act play. It was the implementation of a novel model for interdisciplinary performance art, a method of working that would serve as the template for later happenings. Had it not been for John Cage’s own incendiary “Defense of Satie” lecture, this performance at the end of the 1948 summer series would have been remembered as the most radical and artistically important moment of the summer, because it was.

Satie begins by explaining his play is “a lyrical comedy in one act with music for dance by the same gentleman.” While the plot is ostensibly about Baron Medusa questioning a young man who wants to marry Medusa’s daughter, the short play actually includes 7 disjointed scenes in what Alan Gillmor called an “uninhibited burlesque,” a “play that abounds in non sequiturs.” The published version includes a piano score with musical notation, but no time signatures, keys, or measure bars. In terms of the choreography, there is only the instruction that there be a dancing mechanical monkey.

The 1948 performance embraced the absurdist nature of the text, beginning with M.C. Richards’ translation of Satie’s “de nos jours” to the line “the day before yesterday,” a time that reflects the temporal uncertainty throughout the original play. The casting of non-actor faculty in lead roles (Fuller as Medusa and Elaine de Kooning as his daughter), the all-hands production staff from across the College, the improvised nature of parts of the performance, fourth-wall violations, and even the fact that the performance was a once-only event are evidence of the importance of the 1948 performance as the archetype for later happenings and interdisciplinary performance art practices.

Michael Beggs: Against the 1948 Summer Session

The 1948 Summer Session has become a legendary event in Black Mountain College history, especially because of the presence of a star-studded visiting faculty, featuring future avant-garde luminaries like John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and R. Buckminster Fuller. This talk challenges the primacy of the 1948 Summer Session in our conception of the College, considering it not as a defining moment, but instead as a troubling anomaly in the College’s history. By digging into previous summer sessions and collaborative performances at BMC, the talk will frame the 1948 Summer Session within the larger context of the College’s changing attitudes about educational philosophy, interdisciplinarity, and collaboration.

SESSION NO. 5 – Room 207

Performance and Black Mountain Poetry II

Moderator: Joseph Pizza

Jeff Davis: Ronald Johnson and the Black Mountain School

Ronald Johnson has never been counted among the ‘Black Mountain Poets, though he was closely associated with several of them, particularly Jonathan Williams. Robert Creeley counted him among the “defining peers of my own imagined company of poets ageless and yet insistently specific to all one’s life might seem to be here and now.” He was also close to the west coast Black Mountain scene, as embodied by Robert Duncan and his circle. As his friend and editor Peter O’Leary puts it, “When Ronald Johnson moved to San Francisco in 1969, Robert Duncan was one of his most important initial contacts, soldered by Duncan’s friendship and involvement with Johnson’s partner through the 1960s, Jonathan Williams, who was both a student of Duncan’s at Black Mountain, and one of his publishers, having issued Letters in 1956 with his press The Jargon Society. “

These early associations aside, according to O’Leary, “Duncan’s and Johnson’s friendship was forged in the 1970s when they exchanged works and ideas. Johnson dedicated RADI OS from 1977 to Duncan; Duncan provided guidance to Johnson as he began work on his long poem “WOR(L)DS,” eventually to become ARK, the initial publication for which Duncan supplied a rare endorsement.”

Johnson’s innovations in verse became essential tools for the generation of poets just coming into their own defining practice during the later years of Johnson’s short life; RADI OS, for instance, helped define the poem of erasure as a serious tool for exploring strategies of composition. His work has the openness that Olson so prized, and at the same time speaks in its own visionary, vatic voice, discovering and announcing new patterns, new orders, in the lived world of the imagination.

Seth Forrest:  “There is / a silence / to fill”: Performed Materiality in the Work of Robert Creeley, John Chamberlain, and Franz Kline

This paper offers an analysis of form, content, materiality, and hapticity on three very well-known Black Mountain figures: Robert Creeley, John Chamberlain, and Franz Kline. The paper takes a close look at Creeley’s enjambment, Chamberlain’s twisted metal, and Kline’s heavy lines, with particular emphasis on the ways formal analysis can articulate common aesthetics and practices in poetry—on the page and in the audio archive—and in sculpture and two-dimensional painting and drawing that emerged at Black Mountain.

SESSION NO. 6 – Room 230

As If A Made Place: Visiting Black Mountain Through Creative Making

Moderator: Bevin O’Connor

Bevin O’Connor: Bodying Forth: created presence, process elegy, and the tactile poetics of paper-making

This paper reflects on my work exploring M.C. Richards’s “bodying forth” poetics, and her approach to poetry, which centers a tactile interaction with material. Richards focuses on the Greek root of poetry, Poien (meaning “to make”), to highlight poetry as making or “created presence.” My presentation explores the making of paper-elegies: a process which uses recycled paper material and copies of my father’s writing to engage an elegiac mode which might allow for a different temporal movement than that of traditional elegy. Recycled paper permits a meditation on Black Mountain’s practice of using found materials, and allows for a different sort of temporally situated mourning. Making recycled paper-poem-objects is not only a tactile process but a multi-directional one: the material transforms from paper/compositions, to raw paper pulp, back to paper/compositions. It resists a “finished” or “final” product. Traditional elegy suggests a somewhat linear, unilateral movement from grief to consolation. Recycled paper-making works outside predominant ideas about grief, time, and embodiment, offering new ways of experiencing interpersonal connection. In addition, my presentation explores how the poem-objects “bodied forth” by the paper-making process intersect with Richards’s idea of poetry as created presence.

Mathew Weitman: Geodesic Drone: Chance Experiments for Modular Synthesis

This paper details my re-application of John Cage’s Chance Operations for Composition. In brief, I have adapted Cage’s methods by creating a chart in which dice-rolls correspond to the input/output patch points on a modular synthesizer. These patch points reroute the oscillator of the analogue synthesizer, thus manipulating the soundwave’s frequency, pulse, and shape (to clarify this process, I’ll have a slideshow with photos and audio samples). Once these parameters are set, a performer improvises and/or composes within these predetermined constraints. As one can also patch additional synthesizers/acoustic instruments together, the possibilities of these chance operations are nearly infinite.

This paper is also a reflection on my initial design for adapting Cage’s methods: a performance in the unique acoustic environment of Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome (built by fellow panelist Kelan Nee). As was the case with Fuller’s first dome (later named The Supine Dome), the actualization of such a project proved to be more difficult than its conceptualization. This paper is not only a description of my chance operations, but also an exploration of friendship and collaboration as it reconsiders ideas of success and failure.

Kelan Nee: Geodesic Drone: Exploring Synergy in the Arc of a Geodesic Dome

This paper is a proposed expansion in the understanding of  “synergy,” somewhat beyond Fuller’s physical design conception of the term. It reflects on the experience of building a dome in the style of Buckminster Fuller’s design, with co-panelist Mathew Weitman, exploring more of Fuller’s concepts, made famous through his neologisms in action across disciplines, experientially. The dome stands at 12-feet in diameter with a height of 6-feet at the center, with tension equally distributed through 65 pieces of PVC, connected to two of 26 total hubs. All told, the tensegrity of the dome is dispersed across 6 large pentagons and 10 smaller equilateral triangles (figures and images of the dome and design will be included). The paper explores the experience of building the dome and attempting to cover it to make it acoustically inviting for a musical piece (designed by Weitman). Importantly, the paper explores the reality of failure and success as defined by the community encountering and/or enacting each in real time. Ultimately, the synergy created and encountered takes place across and between the tensions of space and sound, friendship and creativity, human collaboration and material, enhancing understanding of each through the experience documented.

9:00 – 10:00am

Coffee + Conversation – Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (120 College St., downtown Asheville)

10:00am

Depart for Lake Eden Campus Tour

Carpools depart from BMCM+AC for Black Mountain College’s Lake Eden Campus Tour, led by David Silver and Alice Sebrell – $20 per person

Durational Performance, multiple locations on the campus

lauri stallings, choreographer, and moving artists Zandia Covington and Mary Jane Pennington – the word for world is forest

Kyriakos Apostolidis is a performance artist and movement researcher, and founder of Morphoplastics practice-based research project. Their live performances, using biometrics and video projections, present movement-based endurance actions that culminate in audio-visual installations at the intersection of art & technology and expanded cinema.

Jeff Arnal has worked in the arts and nonprofit sector for the past two decades, first as a percussionist, and later as an arts administrator and curator. He became the Executive Director of BMCM+AC in June 2016. He is the curator of BMCM+AC’s exhibition Points in Space: Performance at Black Mountain College (Sept. 5, 2025 – Jan. 10, 2026).

Claire Elizabeth Barratt (artist moniker CillaVee) is the director of the international arts organization Cilla Vee Life Arts, established in 2002, and has run The Center for Connection + Collaboration from her home in Asheville, NC since 2020. She served an apprenticeship with the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation and received her MFA in Creative Practice from the Transart Institute for Creative Research with Plymouth University where she developed the Living Art performance pedagogy.

Joseph Bathanti is former North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14); recipient of the NC Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor; and an inductee of the NC Literary Hall of Fame. Author of over twenty books, Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University. His co-edited volume, The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry, from UNC Press, was released in February 2025.

Barbara von Bechtolsheim is a cultural historian. She has contributed to the transatlantic dialogue as a translator of contemporary North American literature and as an author. Her recent research about creative couples explores the divide between biographical study and formalistic analysis. In Paare (2022) and Hanna Arendt und Heinrich Blücher (2023) she discusses creative relationships in the context of their respective cultural, historic, and psychological life trajectories.

Michael Beggs is a designer, artist and independent scholar. A scholar of BMC since 2010, he has written extensively about the College and Josef and Anni Albers. In 2023 he co-authored the book Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students with Julie J. Thomson. Most recently, he co-organized programs on Black Mountain College at Palm Springs Modernism Week with Katie Horak.

James Belflower is a multidisciplinary artist and poet, and Teaching Professor at Siena College. His work investigates how language mingles us with matter. He is the coauthor of the graphic novel HIST (Calamari Press 2022), and the multimedia text Canyons (Flimb Press 2016) with Matthew Klane. His work appears, or is forthcoming in Somatechnics, Capacities To, Postmodern Culture, Journal of Modern Literature, and Diagram, among others.

Max Bielenberg is a designer and engineer originally from Ireland now living in Reno, Nevada. He works with startups and large enterprises applying user-centered and design thinking methods to make new ideas and technologies into useful and usable products and services. He has a BA in Engineering from Cambridge University and a MA in design from the Royal College of Art in London. Max has a passion for making and education, and enjoys sharing his work with others to make learning inspiring and fun.

S. Boone teaches English at Harding University. He received his PhD from Auburn University, where he defended his dissertation, “Truth and Method on Black Mountain: The Hermeneutic Stances of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan.” His book, Understanding Jorie Graham, is forthcoming from the University of South Carolina Press, in December of 2025. His book of poetry, Biblical Proportions, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2026.

Jacqueline Calle is a performer and educator. As a member of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, she has toured internationally with Natalia Osipova and has performed works by Merce Cunningham, Jose Limon, and Bill T. Jones among others. She is currently receiving a Teacher Certification in Cunningham Technique and her credits include (PBS) ISADORA, (Kovgan A.) Cunningham Film, and (Madoff D.) August Pace. Jacqueline divides her time between New York and the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Justin Childress is an Assistant Professor for the Master of Arts in Design in Innovation (MADI) program at Southern Methodist University. Originally trained as a graphic designer during the emergent days of the web, he is an interdisciplinary designer and researcher focused on the overlaps of art and engineering, the metaphysics of cities, and *good enough* design/build methodologies for both physical and digital environments.

Clare Ivey Colton has been a legal writer and editor, a practicing attorney, and a special education teacher. She is a life-long lover of the arts and follower of Black Mountain College. She has written a nonfiction book that includes the history of Asheville’s Highland Hospital, an early psychiatric institution, and Black Mountain College in the 1930s and 40s. It focuses in part on the life of Mary Althea Parker, a local artist, and how the hospital and BMC were transformative for her.

Raleigh Dailey is an internationally recognized pianist, composer, and educator. He has performed widely throughout the United States, North and South America, Europe, and Asia. He is the pianist and composer for the DiMartino/Osland Jazz Orchestra, the Osland/Dailey Jazztet, the Raleigh Dailey Trio, and the duo Tandem. Dailey is the founder of Llama Records, which focuses on jazz and creative music and was the subject of a feature article in Down Beat magazine. As Professor of Jazz Studies at the University of Kentucky, Dailey teaches courses in jazz piano, jazz improvisation, and small and large ensembles.

Jeff Davis is an independent scholar and poet based in Asheville. In addition to presenting on the Black Mountain poets for many years, he has also been a dedicated archiver of audio recordings of the Charles Olson Society and related poetry forums. Scholarship aside, he is the longtime producer and host of WordPlay on AshevilleFM (now in its 20th year), is a founding member and volunteer for Asheville Free Media, and the author of NatureS.

Robert Ladislas Derr is a visual artist making performance art from live to intervention, videos, photographs, and multimedia installations. He has exhibited and performed widely at such venues as, the Riga Performance Festival (Latvia), SomoS Art House (Germany), Canberra Contemporary Art Space (Australia), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (Germany), Wexner Center for the Arts (US), LIVE Performance Art Biennale (Canada), and Irish Film Institute (Ireland).

Douglas Drewek is a saxophonist, composer, and educator whose work bridges classical, jazz, and experimental traditions. He teaches at Berea College, where he directs the jazz ensemble and composition studio, and serves on the faculty of the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts. His performances explore improvisation, acoustic nuance, and electroacoustic texture.

Donna Wojnar Dzurilla, MFA’s writing has been anthologized and appears in many journals and publications. Her visual art and sculpture has appeared in juried shows at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, BoxHeart Gallery, The Panza Gallery, PGH Tech Council shows, and featured in Urbanic 2: Catalyzing a Regional Economic Renaissance-Pittsburgh International Airport. In 2010 Dzurilla was commissioned to create a public art piece for Three Rivers Arts Festival by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

Casey Edwards is a vocalist living in Asheville, NC. He completed a master’s degree of music in vocal performance from Texas Tech University and a master’s degree of library and information science from The University of Southern Mississippi. He currently works as an inventory specialist at Spicer Greene Jewelers and as a tenor cantor at First Presbyterian Church of Asheville. 

Justin William Evans is a poet, playwright, and teacher in North Carolina. His writing has appeared in Keith, Blood Orange Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere. His writing credits for the stage include A Tonguey Kiss for Samuel Davidson, Satan v. Laundry, and In Loving Memory: The Poet and Citizen Martha Whythblath, which was voted “Fan Favorite” at the 2023 Asheville Fringe Festival. He holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and teaches in the Film Studies Department at UNCC. 

Derek Fenner is an artist, poet, and Assistant Professor of Art Education at USC Upstate in South Carolina. He is the author of Wild Schemes (2010), Gossamer Nevele Grimoire (2020), and Under New Alchemy (2025), and co-editor of Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader (2019). He co-founded Bootstrap Press, which has published over 50 titles since 2000.

Holly Filsinger works as a Gallery and Collections Assistant at University Galleries of Illinois State University and was the previous Collections Specialist at BMCM+AC under an ILMS grant in 2024 to increase access to the permanent collection through digitization efforts. She enjoys working with books, automata, paper, clay, and fiber. 

Seth Forrest is Associate Professor of English at Coppin State University in Baltimore. He teaches writing and modern and contemporary literature and writes criticism on modern American poetry, art, and sound. He is completing a monograph on the common aesthetic of poets and artists at Black Mountain College, and he is sketching out a new project, an interdisciplinary primer on noise and ambient form in modern and contemporary art. 

Thomas Frank is an American historian with primary interests in religious institutions, liberal arts education, and historic preservation. Retired from the faculties of Wake Forest and Emory Universities, he is editor of the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies. 

gordon fung is a transdisciplinary artist-curator, writer, performer, multi-instrumentalist, and runaway composer who works across a wide range of time-based media, including audiovisual performances, new media installations, experimental film/video, media archaeology, participatory works, performance arts, and Happenings, among others. As a firm believer in collectivism and synergy, his curations cultivate two maxims: “making good communities better” and “finding arts in all things.”

Jeff Gardiner is a poet and independent scholar based in San Francisco. In addition to having presented on the work of Black Mountain poets at various conferences, including previous Reviewing gatherings, and published scholarly articles on their for many years, he has also been the co-chair of the Charles Olson Society.

William Graham is a self-taught artist, often in the Neo-plasticist style, and a sometime independent scholar with a non-traditional education. He is a regular volunteer with BMCM+AC and occasional presenter at the conference. In all, he has led an unusual, if not unique, life that includes growing up on a seminary campus and a year at the Universidad de la Habana.

Charlott Greub is an artist, architect, urban designer, and Associate Professor of Architecture at North Dakota State University in Fargo. Her work has been exhibited in many fine art museums across Germany. She holds an MFA in Sculpture and an MA in Architecture from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. She is licensed as an architect in Germany and the EU and practiced internationally as an architect in New York City (USA), Maastricht (Netherlands), and Berlin (Germany).

Taryn Griggs and Chris Yon create original dance works that are deadpan slapstick, understated melodrama, autobiographical science fiction, cubist vaudeville, asymmetrically consonant explorations of magic and virtuosity in everyday movement. Chris and Taryn’s last work was made under the moniker The Yoggs with their daughter Bea and toured to Minneapolis, Limerick, New York, Durham, and finally Asheville at BMC. They live in Boone and teach at Appalachian State University.

Jeff Hamilton, a retired Washington University Lecturer, continues to teach in the WU McKelvey School of Engineering. His essays on “Black Mountain Poetries”, “Robert Duncan”, “Laura (Riding) Jackson”, and  “James Wright”, appear in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context (2021). Recent poems are in the UCity Review and Sou’wester.

Lexie Harvey is a community and event organizer, arts administrator, and independent researcher living outside of Asheville, NC. She holds an MA in Critical Craft Studies from Warren Wilson College. Her research and engagement practices are informed by an interest in personal archives and ephemera, oral history, kinship structures and world-building.

Flutist/vocalist Emily Hay was born in rural Virginia, received a BFA at Bard College in New York and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. For several decades, Hay was an influential performer, concert presenter and radio show host in Los Angeles where she was involved in the avant-garde music performance scene, specializing in the genres of art rock, music improvisation, and world music.

Elliot Inman is a regular presenter at the ReVIEWING conference. In 2018, he led a panel on “The Makerspace as 21st Century Bauhaus.” Since then, he has presented on Natasha Goldowski (2019), John Cage (2021), and others bringing a new perspective through the use of digital humanities methods and interdisciplinary analysis, most recently with “Anni Albers: Color Theorist” (2023) in which he proposed Albers is best understood as a theorist for whom weaving was an existence proof.

Devin King is the author, most recently, of Gathering (Kenning Editions). He lives in Berkeley, CA where he has just finished editing the letters between Ronald Johnson and Jonathan Williams. 

Andrew Kohn currently teaches string bass, music theory, and music composition at West Virginia University. Dr. Kohn’s activities as a music theorist include conference papers and publications concerning Bach, Chopin, Edward T. Cone, Dallapiccola, Pärt, Poulenc, and Wolpe. He has also published extensively on bass-related topics. He has released recordings on Albany, Music Minus One, Ravello, and elsewhere. An active composer, his works emphasize choral music and instrumental solos and duos.

Alex Landry is an artist, researcher, and emerging curator currently working as a curatorial assistant in Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She earned her Master’s degree in Art History from the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University, where her thesis focused on Ray Johnson and the influence of Black Mountain College on his practice. She has held previous curatorial roles at both the Newcomb Art Museum and the Asheville Art Museum.

Ellen Levy is the author of Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle between the Arts (Oxford UP, 2011) and A Book About Ray (MIT, 2024). Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in such journals as Dissent, Genre, Modernism/Modernity, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and Twentieth Century Literature. She has taught at Vanderbilt University, Pratt Institute, and the School of Visual Arts.

Sean Lopez is an intermedia artist and educator at George Mason University exploring consciousness and profanation through performance, projection mapping, and installation. Combining poetry, theater, folklore, and digital media, he examines humanity’s paradoxical relationship with imagination—craving creative freedom while fearing its power. He is a PhD candidate researching intermedial studies at the University of Maine, and holds an MFA from the University of North Texas. 

Hannah Mathews recently graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in literary criticism from the English Department at Georgia State University. She is excited to start applying to graduate programs this spring focusing on her interest in queer and feminist postmodern American poetry.

Debra McCall is a dance historian, choreographer, Certified Movement Analyst, and performer best known for her reconstructions of Oskar Schlemmer’s 1920s Bauhaus Dances. Recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the NEH, she also received the Rome Prize in Design from the American Academy in Rome and a Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award for her documentation of medieval reliefs of sacred dancers at the Thillai Nataraja Temple in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu. McCall served on the graduate faculties of New York University and Pratt Institute where she was Mellon Lecturer. Her Bauhaus work has been presented in a variety of venues including Performa 09, Artissima 17 Torino, and Harvard University’s The Bauhaus and Harvard: 100 years.

Jason Miller is Distinguished Professor & Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor in the Department of English at NC State University. Supported by a yearlong Fellowship at the National Humanities Center, he is currently completing work on his fourth book on writer Langston Hughes entitled: Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power.

 Maurice Moore is an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They received a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Performance Studies from the University of California-Davis.

Kate Tarlow Morgan, a choreographer, teacher, and historian with training in dance, ethnoarchaeology, and cultural history, curates The Rhythms Archive (1914–Current), mapping movement practices that evolved alongside American Progressive Education. As Editor of Currents Journal of the Body-Mind Centering Association and co-founder of the Somatic Writing Collective Series, Kate is also consulting editor for the Lost & Found: C.U.N.Y Poetics Document Initiative at the Center of Humanities in NYC.

Eireene Nealand has degrees from UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Santa Cruz, where she completed her PhD in Literature, writing about proprioception as it was used by the American and French avant-garde. She currently lives in Santa Cruz, where she writes and translates Russian and Bulgarian poetry.

Kelan Nee is a poet, writer, educator, and carpenter from Massachusetts. His debut collection Felling was published in May of 2024 and was winner of the 2023 Vassar Miller prize. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems and elsewhere. His nonfiction has been featured in the Paris Review. He lives in Houston, Texas where is pursuing a PhD in Poetry and Critical Poetics. He is the Editor in chief of Gulf Coast Journal. 

Bevin O’Connor received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, Third Coast, Bear Review, Annulet, Palette Poetry, Afternoon Visitor, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Poetry at the University of Houston, where she is an Inprint Nina and Michael Zilkha Fellowship recipient and winner of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. Bevin serves as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.

Maria Parrini, a pianist, is originally from Greenville, SC, and is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she earned a Bachelor of Music degree under the instruction of Antonio Pompa-Baldi and Paul Schenly. She just completed a Master’s degree in piano at Columbus State University with Esther Park and is currently a DMA Candidate at UT Austin Butler School of Music.

David Peifer is a Professor of Mathematics at UNC Asheville. His mathematical research is directly related to work begun by Max Dehn, who taught at Black Mountain College. Peifer has also written several articles concerning the role of the sciences at Black Mountain College. For 14 years, Peifer has been a board member of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Besides research, he enjoys, mountain biking, playing music, and roaming the local mountains searching for wildflowers.

Jess Peri was born in Dallas, Texas and received a BFA from the University of North Texas and a MFA from the University of New Mexico. Peri lives and works in Columbia, South Carolina where he is a Professor of Art at the University of South Carolina.

Joseph Pizza earned his doctorate in English Language & Literature from the University of Oxford and is currently Associate Professor of English at Belmont Abbey College, where he regularly teaches courses on Modern and Contemporary Literature, African American Studies, and Creative Writing. In addition, he is the author of the two book-length projects, the critical study Dissonant Voices: Race, Jazz, and Innovative Poetics in Mid-Century America, and the chapbook Promissory Notes.

Deborah Randolph, Principal Researcher, International Scholars Group, is an independent researcher and museum educator. Research interests include historic textile exhibitions, Alice Kagawa Parrott, art museums, and arts and social justice. She has been on the education team at two art museums. Her publications include An Introductory Guide to Qualitative Research in Art Museums (Love & Randolph, 2024) and five chapters in edited volumes. She holds a PhD in Education from UNC-Chapel Hill.

Caitlyn Schrader is a dance artist attracted to experiential engagement and challenging modes of traditional classifications, whether it is through the learning environments she facilitates, the events she curates, or the performative spaces she designs and presents upon. She functions within the belief that the act of making dance is a social practice. She values systems that are rooted in community, experimentation, horizontal integration of disciplines, and authentic human relationships.

David Silver is professor of environmental studies and urban agriculture at the University of San Francisco. He teaches classes on urban agriculture, hyper-local food systems, and food, culture, and storytelling. David recently published The Farm at Black Mountain College (Atelier Editions and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2024). He serves as the faculty advisor of the USF Food Pantry and is one of the original founders of the USF Seed Library. He lives in Oakland with his family. 

Drew Sisk is a graphic designer and artist based in South Carolina, where he is Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Clemson University. His research and personal work blurs the lines between fine art and graphic design, using live web-based work, installation, and print media as ways to critically explore the conjunction of media, politics, and technology.

lauri stallings is a Georgia choreographer who works both inside and outside of art world institutions through her site-responsive process works. She is a Creative Time artist, USA Artists nominee (2022, 2018), recipient of an Artadia Award, and the High Museum of Art’s first choreographer-in-residence. She is the inaugural artist of Flux Projects, and developed The Traveling Show, a long-term project engaging rural South communities with support from the Rauschenberg Foundation.

Justin Tornow is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator. She is the founder of COMPANY, an NC-based collective that produces experimental installations and performances. Tornow teaches university courses in dance practices and dance studies, and her current research interests include Black Mountain College, the U.S. dance avant-gardes, and practices that activate John Dewey’s radical formulations of democracy, experience, art, and pedagogy in the 21st century.

Sol Swan Tuite is a trans activist located in Asheville, North Carolina who employs the mediums of philosophy, linguistics, and art to communicate and articulate the crisis of trans youth in America. In addition to completing their senior year in high school, Sol has developed a machine-learning program to improve health outcomes, 2 videogames, and enjoys walking the streets of Asheville. 

Dominika Tylcz is an art historian and curator, currently serving as a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art. They hold a BA degree in history of art from Oxford University and a MA degree in Curatorial Studies from Center of Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Their writing has been published in Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, and others.

Mathew Weitman’s work appears in The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Notes & Queries, The Southwest Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the AWP Kurt Brown Prize, and the Inprint Verlaine Prize for Poetry. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD in critical poetics at the University of Houston where he is an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow and a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.

Tymek Woodham studied English at Warwick University before completing his PhD at University College London in 2021. His first book, The Poetics of Agency (Bloomsbury 2026), traces how post-war anxieties surrounding the nature of human agency propelled the poetic experiments of Charles Olson, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara and Denise Levertov. Currently a research fellow at Queen Mary University of London, his next project is a critical history of interdisciplinarity at Black Mountain College.