ReVIEWING 16 Abstracts + Presenter Bios

Ongoing in the Lobby

Nyssa Collins: Object Dance – the making of a stop motion animation

This durational performance will expose the elements of an object choreography created in real time. Visitors to the conference will observe the film-in-progress at different times throughout the day and watch a coherent dance emerge. The film will be non-narrative; however ephemeral characters, relationships, and dramatic events will emerge from the objects as they are animated. The film will contain several elements of responsiveness and aleatoric processes while responding to themes, schools of thought, and artists of Black Mountain College in its use of ephemera, its treatment of objects as dancers, and its placing of sound score and movement on equal levels. 

1:30 – 2:45pm 
SESSION NO. 1 – Manheimer Room
Moderator: Cherry Saenger

Maxwell Fertik: Raccoons in the Cybertruck: On Fuller’s Comprehensive Design as Radical Ecological Practice

Buckminster Fuller envisioned the Comprehensive Designer not as a narrow specialist, but as a scrappy, multidisciplinary practitioner capable of synthesizing information, observing critically, and translating technologies and artifacts into tools for human well-being. His concept of Spaceship Earth insists that all modifications to our ecological system remain relative to a single, finite planet whose preservation is inseparable from humanity’s future. This paper argues that Spaceship Earth, and the fraught, codependent relationship between industry and ecology it describes, should serve as a core principle of design education today. The presentation will examine pedagogical case studies including the use of hyperlocal materials, greenwoodworking, and the design of inflatables and kites, as models for weaving biodesign, ecoliteracy, and handicraft into the foundations of design training.

John R Jungck: Self-Assembling and Self-Folding Biological Architectures

Viral capsid models were directly influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome models initially built at Black Mountain College and were so recognized by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry celebrating the Caspar-Klug mathematical model of the icosahedral family of viral capsids. Four-dimensional printing expands three-dimensional printing by adding a kinetic dimension wherein the 3D printed pieces come together without human
interaction. In response to external stimuli like water, heat, light, or magnetic fields, the 3D-printed objects change shape, properties, or functionality over time. 4D printing has numerous applications in biology (viral capsids, ribosome assembly, DNA origami), medicine (self-adjusting medical implants, smart drug delivery systems), material science, emergency shelters, aerospace environments, soft robotics, and even in fashion. We have developed models of self-assembling, self-folding, and self-expanding polyhedral and helical viral capsids. This research has relevance to biomimetic design particularly to employing nanocapsules made of viral capsids (“virosomes”) as carriers of drugs in medical applications. Educationally, I will address how entropy-driven self-organization of complex biological structures is counterintuitive to most literature on design in nature and how hands-on models help counter misconceptions and how these models relate to architecture.

Craig Kerins: Making As Thinking

This proposal will trace the tradition of the workshop as a means to learn, inform design, and shape the built environment. With clear roots in Bauhaus pedagogy that continued to evolve at Black Mountain College, workshops have played an important role in guiding hands-on learning. Simple exercises and small, humble projects learned in a workshop setting can translate to necessary skills for all scales of design and architecture. Told from an architect’s perspective, this proposal will trace examples of workshop lessons at Black Mountain College through projects at UNC Charlotte’s School of Architecture, lessons that led  to the founding of a Design Build architecture practice where making and/or building are an integrated part of a complete design process.

SESSION NO. 2 – Room 120
Albers, Bauhaus, and Black Mountain: Critiques and Enhancements to a Modernist Color Legacy
Moderator: Benny Fountain
Benny Fountain, Richard Kenton Webb, and Fritz Horstman

This Panel is made up of three artists associated with the Josef and Annie Albers Foundation: past artists in residence Richard Kenton Webb and Benny Fountain, and the Foundation’s Educational Director, Fritz Horstman. Both Webb and Fountain have closely studied the color theory, teaching, and practice of Josef Albers, and with it the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College Legacy. While they have both gained a great deal from this innovator in color, they have also found places to critique and extend his paradigm. In dialogue with Fritz Horstman, a preeminent expert on Albers’s color, Fountain and Webb will discuss their critiques and perspectives

SESSION NO. 3 – Room 206
Robert Creeley Centennial (Panel One)
Moderator: Joshua Hoeynck

At this year’s ReVIEWING Black Mountain College Conference, the Charles Olson Society is sponsoring a series of three panels celebrating the centenary of the poet Robert Creeley’s life and work.

Basil Lloyd Moffett – Like and Unlike: Robert Creeley, J. V. Cunningham, and the Poetics of Erotic Negation

Did they not have almost completely opposite views on poetry and its purposes, we could say that Robert Creeley and J. V. Cunningham were two of the most similar minds of the twentieth century. This paper argues that seeing Creeley in the larger context of post-war American poetry obliges us to look beyond his immediate circle and legacy. New comparisons bring new clarity. Comparing Creeley to Cunningham, a poet so formally different but thematically (and in some salient senses intellectually) similar, challenges and clarifies Creeley’s notions of form and allows us to recognize parallel formal maneuvers that structure their poetry.

Miriam Nichols – Moving the Mountain: Creeley – Olson strategies in contemporary poetry

In response to the chaos of war and industrial change, Creeley and Olson proposed major resets of poetic thinking, aimed at creating alternatives to the human tendency to seek power-over rather than entrance-to the living world. This presentation will discuss the ways in which contemporary poets,  Meredith Quartermain, Ammiel Alcalay, and André Spears use and transform Creeley-Olson strategies to carry forward a similar reset into our own period of instability and technological change. 

Seth Forrest – “Fit”: Robert Creeley’s Art Criticism and the Haptic Poetic

From the mid-1950s through the 1980s, Creeley produced a sustained body of critical prose that articulated a consistent vocabulary of hapticity, material resistance, and formal “fit.” By tracing this vocabulary through his commentaries on Laubiès, Kline, Guston, Callahan, and Chamberlain, this presentation demonstrates that what these artists do with paint, metal, and film, Creeley does with syntax, enjambment, and syllable. His art criticism is not a sidebar of his poetics but a record of the same haptic intelligence at work.

SESSION NO. 4– Room 207
Designing a Residency: Influence, Vision and Practice
Moderator: Tyler Emerson-Dorsch
Tyler Emerson-Dorsch, Brook Dorsch, James Stevens, and Ibett Yanez del Castillo

The Emerson Dorsch Artist Residency (EDAR) is an emerging artist residency in the mountains of Western North Carolina whose founders have looked to Black Mountain College as a framework for thinking about the relationship between place, learning, architecture, and creative practice. This panel will examine how ideas associated with Black Mountain College informed the development of a contemporary residency and how questions of landscape, hydrology, infrastructure, construction methods, artistic needs, and long-term stewardship continually reshaped the project’s ambitions. Through three presentations that individually approach a different perspective of the residency’s design, the panel asks how contemporary cultural institutions can draw inspiration from Black Mountain College while responding to present-day realities of ecology, construction, community, and creative work.

SESSION NO. 5– Room 230
Moderator: Ralph Burns

Elliot Inman: Visual Riddles and the Unexpected: The Art of Ruth Asawa and Ray Johnson

Ruth Asawa’s looped-wire sculptures and Ray Johnson’s mail art reflect the Black Mountain College paradox: strict, serious art classes and a passionate embrace of uninhibited experimentation. Both artists’ work reflects their disciplined training in drawing, weaving, and design techniques like repetition, tessellation, and juxtaposition; at the same time, they were both wildly experimental. Asawa and Johnson may seem to have little in common in terms of their personal histories, but the Black Mountain College curriculum and culture had a remarkably similar effect on their work and lives, leading to art that presents itself as a visual riddle, a puzzle, a question that may not have an answer, a koan. In doing so, their work continues to conjure our desire for the delights of the unexpected.

Katherine Kuenzli: To Monte Alban and Back Again: Anni Albers at Black Mountain College

Anni Albers famously reoriented her weaving practice and pedagogy at Black Mountain College to embrace a wider range of technical processes associated with ancient American weaving. My paper considers her works, such as Monte Alban and Ancient Writing, in tandem with her formation of the Harriet Engelhardt Memorial Collection of textiles, a teaching collection of mostly Latin American textiles she compiled for her students at Black Mountain. In both her work and teaching, Albers rejected European discourses of primitivism to highlight the technical versatility and inventiveness of ancient American civilizations. Most of the existing literature on Pan-Americanism focuses on modern painting or on ancient ceramics, stone carvings, and metalwork. This paper places textiles, and more specifically textile techniques, front and center as significant objects of cultural exchange and reimagining

3:00 – 4:30pm 
WORKSHOP – Manheimer Room
Mike Oleon: Bring Structure to Life: A Hands-On Tensegrity Workshop

Build geodesic and tensegrity forms by hand, then bring them to life. Using giant kits with a patent-pending assembly system, participants make structures that stand, balance, and move like puppets. Animate one yourself and feel how breath and movement run on the same tension-and-compression logic that organizes the living body. No experience needed.

WORKSHOP – Room 206
Patrick Farris: Making Place: Exploring the Centrality of Place to Black Mountain College

This workshop will use the photographs of Hazel Larsen Archer and the leaf studies of Josef Albers as a starting place to explore how place, the physical environment of Black Mountain College, shows up in the work of students at Black Mountain College. It will include a brief discussion of examples of place in contemporary photography, and invite participants to engage in exploring their own “place” through writing exercises, iPhone photography, and peer discussion.

WORKSHOP– Room 207
Sonja Thomsen: Whose eyes do you see through? Locating Hazel Larsen Archer and her ways of seeing.

Sonja Thomsen leads a workshop on Hazel Larsen Archer, the primary photographer of Black Mountain College. It opens with an extract from Thomsen’s film in development Two Schools and a recorded conversation with Meg Jackson Fox and Erika Zarrow, steward of the family archive, on how Hazel built a philosophy of seeing, from the windows of the home where she lay with polio to the classroom where Fuller certified her to teach dymaxion theory. Participants then try one of Hazel’s looking exercises.

WORKSHOP – Room 230
Lauren Whitehurst: The Language of Paper Weaving: A Workshop Inspired by Anni Albers

This workshop invites participants to explore weaving through one of its most accessible materials: paper. Using colored paper strips as warp and weft, participants will create handwoven structures while discovering the principles that informed Anni Albers’s lifelong investigations of weaving. Designed as an exploratory session for looking, making, and thinking, the workshop welcomes participants of all experience levels.

6:30 – 8:30pm – RECEPTION for IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES: Black Mountain College Architecture + Design exhibition Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (120 College St., downtown Asheville)

This exhibition traces the far-reaching impact of Black Mountain College’s design philosophy deeply influenced by Bauhaus ideals across disciplines and generations. It will explore how experimental approaches to materials, pedagogy, and collective living reshaped not only how things were made, but how artists, architects, and thinkers understood the relationship between form and function, people and place, and imagination and environment.

At its core, the exhibition asks: How do creative ideas take root in specific places? In turn, how do those places shape the evolution of those ideas? Through these questions, the exhibition will highlight Black Mountain College as both a physical site and a generative force: a place where radical design, interdisciplinary learning, and collaborative experimentation transformed modern art and architecture and continue to inspire new ways of thinking today.

Imaginary Landscapes is organized by Jeff Arnal, Alice Sebrell, Michael Beggs, Tyler Housholder, and Frédérique Davreux-Hébert, a curatorial fellow made possible through the generous support of the Lyle Bongé Fund, established by the Dusti Bongé Art Foundation.

SESSION NO. 1 – Manheimer Room
Moderator: Elliot Inman

Michael Kellner and Alexandra Robinson: Some aspects of artwork: Considering a collaborative art project through the writing of Anni Albers

In 2015, Alexandra Robinson and Michael Kellner began a collaborative mail-art project. The project began with a few parameters to encourage each other to make work in the face of all their respective responsibilities as parents, academics, and artists. Initially, the plan was to keep the work private, but when they were given the opportunity to exhibit it, they were surprised by its reception and how it resonated with others. For this presentation, the artists will present the work of this decade-plus project, utilizing the language of Anni Albers specifically and the experimentation of Black Mountain more broadly to conceptualize their discovery.

Adam Lion: When a Line Bends

“When a Line Bends” is a vibraphone composition/improvisation performed by Adam Lion. This solo is an ever changing study of sound, material, performer, and space. As these subjects enmesh, relationships emerge dictating form and process, pushing the music with a sense of immediacy. Lion navigates these constraints through techniques developed during the spontaneity of live performance, an approach which openly embraces contingency as a powerful compositional tool.

Tymek Woodham: Architectures of Experience: Xanti Schawinsky, John Evarts and the Danse Macabre (1938)

Following his arrival in 1937, Xanti Schawinsky electrified the Black Mountain campus. A former student and luminary of the Bauhaus, he was invited by Josef Albers to teach drama, whereupon he transformed the syllabus into a dynamic experiment in modernist pedagogy. Student performances such as Spectodrama (1937) and Danse Macabre (1938) have become central to Black Mountain’s legacy of avant-garde innovation; recent appraisals of Schawinsky have positioned his early experiments as key touchstones for later Black Mountain practitioners such as John Cage, Ruth Asawa and Charles Olson. The picture, however, was not always so rosy. This presentation will attend to the troubled production history of Danse Macabre, Schawinsky’s second and final ‘Stage Studies’ project. Following its archival traces, I argue that the play functioned less as a well-managed laboratory than as a site of contestation between competing visions of interdisciplinary practice. Through close analysis of musical scores written by Shawinsky’s collaborator, John Evarts, I show how the production staged a conflict central to the social world of 1930s Black Mountain, one where questions concerning the value of history and the role of authority in modernist aesthetics came sharply into view.

SESSION NO. 2 – Room 205
Robert Creeley Centennial (Panel Two)
Moderator: Joseph Pizza

Onur Ayaz: “… that one man, Robert Creeley, could write so many pages!” Rhetorically Reading the Intimate Dimensions of Letters

Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence chronicles the exchange of ideas by poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. A letter written by Olson in 1951 remarks on “Creeley’s fullsome letters” and the amazement of “30 kids looking” at their length. Turning to the complete correspondence, this presentation surveys the breadth and scope of the Creeley letters, employing multiple methods of reading that are rhetorical, metatextual, and critical, with a focus on purpose and audience. This approach wonders what effects such engaged letters, as Creeley was known to write, had on his correspondents. Such questions become timely in the context of the digital turn, where correspondence was once conducted through letters, and are instead now done primarily through digital methods. The Olson-Creeley letters, therefore, offer an opportunity to explore these dimensions of authenticity, intimacy, and friendship among two important New American writers.

Jeff Davis: Robert Creeley: Human Again After a Long Time

In his work after Pieces, Robert Creeley’s poetics evolved, especially as it related to his concepts of person, of identity, and of the referentiality of language. The work of his late friend and mentor Charles Olson played a role in these developments, as did Creeley’s own reckoning with the work of Henry Corbin, who had been an important guide for Olson. His imaginal world expanded to include a new valuation of the body and of the commonplace; the transformation of his imagination and re-visioning of his poetics brought him into a world and company that remained central to him for the rest of his life.

Dale Smith: Robert Creeley’s Improvisational Measure

Throughout his life, Robert Creeley pursued an articulation of his creative process alongside an enduring “company” of writers, artists, and musicians. “Creative, as actuality, is here always, never elsewhere in any sense,” he said. A tension in writing of perception, ideas, and the physical resources of the body guided his sense of measure through a patterning of words and their emotional resonance. This paper addresses the emotive and improvisational forces involved in “the creative” as Creeley understood it. The spontaneous, or the illusion of spontaneity, in Creeley’s work derives from a range of sources improvised in the composition of poems as made things.

SESSION NO. 3 – Room 206
The Studies Building at Black Mountain College: Its Past, Present, and Future
Moderator: Charles Flournoy, Executive Director, The Black Mountain College Studies Building Foundation
John G. Waite, Shannon E. Brown, and Nancy A. Rankin

The Black Mountain College Studies Building, located on the northwest bank of Lake Eden in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was originally conceived by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer as part of an ambitious new campus plan for the College. A. Lawrence Kocher, an American architect and friend of Gropius, oversaw the detailed design and the construction of the building in 1941, which was carried out by students and faculty of the school. The Studies Building was the heart of the school’s progressive and experimental arts community. Since that time, it has seen decades of continuous use as a support facility for Camp Rockmont. In 2025, John G. Waite Associates, Architects (JGWA) prepared a Feasibility Report for the Studies Building conservation and restoration project. This presentation will explore the past, present and future of the building through the lens of the project team, moderated by the Executive Director of The Black Mountain College Studies Building Foundation.

SESSION NO. 4 – Room 207
Moderator: Bethany Pierce

Thomas Frank: Frank Aydelotte: Mentor of Black Mountain College

Frank Aydelotte was a far more significant figure in the founding and support of Black Mountain College than is usually recognized. Known mainly as Nell Rice’s brother and an occasional advisor especially in the founding of the college, Aydelotte was a prominent leader in American higher education from the 1920s to the 1960s. His many connections and unwavering guidance were a constant resource for the college across its history. This paper will attempt to give Aydelotte his due and capture his significance as a leader and mentor to the college.

Lilli Treppel: The Temporality of the Grid: Anni Albers, Weaving, and Gendered Time at Black Mountain College

When Anni Albers arrived at Black Mountain in 1933,  the College offered her something the Bauhaus never could: a community whose daily life already operated on the slow, cyclical, non-linear time that weaving had always embodied. This paper argues that Albers’s practice constitutes a sustained temporal critique, one that the rhythms of Black Mountain College uniquely sustained and amplified. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s concept of durée, feminist theories of invisible labor, and close material analysis of works spanning the artist’s Bauhaus and Black Mountain periods, it reads the loom as an instrument of timekeeping. At a college where interdisciplinary exchange was not a stated ideal but a daily reality, Albers’s weaving workshop became a site where craft, theory, architecture, and material thinking converged.

SESSION NO. 5 – Room 230
Moderator: Ben Fluet

Tessa Bolsover: Ground Work: Depth, Roots, and Exhumation in the poetry of Robert Duncan and Susan Howe

This paper examines the dimension of depth in the poetry of Robert Duncan and Susan Howe. Across their respective oeuvres, the “ground” of the poem is figured as an active site where the past may rise into the surface of the present and the obscured under-writings of memory, history, and language may be illuminated.  For Duncan and Howe alike, the poem is a site of rupture and revelation, disinterment and descent. Excavating traces of the past as they are threaded through the substance of the present is a central tenet of both writers’ practices, one which they inherit—in different but connected ways—through their shared poetic lineage. 

Andrew Kohn: Richard Blevins and his Castle Tubin as continuation of Black Mountain Poetics

This paper positions poet and scholar Richard Blevins as a continuation of Black Mountain poetics. His pedigree is clear: spurred on by Don Allen’s 1964 anthology, he studied with Robert Duncan and Edward Dorn; when he lists his most important influences, they are all connected with Black Mountain; he went on to research Black Mountain figures by editing correspondence between Robert Creeley and Charles Olson and by editing the writing of George Butterick; he co-founded a publishing firm (Zelot Press) and he published writings by several Black Mountain figures. His other scholarship involved the Old West, which he studied with Dorn. Most importantly, his writing shows myriad Black Mountain traits, which will be demonstrated with reference to the total content and specific excerpts from his volume, Castle Tubin (Press One, 2006).

Alessandro Porco: Jane Mayhall and the Little Magazine, 1940–1960

In 1960, Jane Mayhall published her debut novel, Cousin to Human, and the dramatic dialogue, “Discourse Before Dawn.” These two publications, however, do not mark the start of Mayhall’s literary career so much as the end of two decades of intensive creative labor. From 1940 to 1960 her poetry, short fiction, plays, and literary essays appeared regularly in little magazines—some prestigious and influential, others regional and niche. Bibliographic in its approach, this presentation focuses on this early period of Mayhall’s poetry in the aesthetic, social, and institutional contexts of the little magazine where her work appeared alongside that of poets such as Delmore Schwartz, William Carlos Williams, Lorine Niedecker, John Ashbery, Jean Garrigue,  Russell Atkins, and many others.

10:30– 12:00
WORKSHOP – Manheimer Room
Kate Tarlow Morgan: The Body is a House: Proprioception in Space at Black Mountain College

BMC (1933–57) was a laboratory where the arts and structures were actively and collaboratively tested. This workshop stems from Kate’s lecture and draws on Charles Olson’s writings exploring the body’s role in space, in houses, and inside itself. Kate will also share physical experiments from Litz’s Icosahedron, Fuller’s Dome, and Tolja’s body conscious design. Essentially, one cannot be inside or outside of architecture without a body. All bodies welcome.

WORKSHOP – Room 120
Stephanie Kuss: Chance, Play, and Process: Building Poems, Composing Spaces, and Bringing Black Mountain College into the classroom and studio

This workshop examines how Black Mountain College’s avant-garde teaching methods can be adapted for early childhood education, drawing on techniques from Cunningham, Asawa, and Cage. Children engaged in play-based, interdisciplinary activities like chance art and building miniature studios. Through these experimental methods, participants will explore how integrating chance operations and architectural modeling fosters sophisticated artistic practice and creative thinking at any age.

WORKSHOP – Room 206
Derek Fenner: Field, Dwelling, Fire: Writing Space at Black Mountain College

Through the work of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, M.C. Richards, and John Wieners, this workshop explores Black Mountain poetics as a practice of design. Field, dwelling, fire, and lived experience become points of departure for generative writing exercises that invite participants to consider how poems shape spaces of relation, imagination, transformation, and belonging.

WORKSHOP – Room 207
N.S. Boone and Michael Hettich: Scoring Simultaneity: Poems of Biblical and Personal Proportions in the Black Mountain College Project

Simultaneity was a key feature of Olson’s and Levertov’s expression of poetics. N. S. Boone and Michael Hettich will involve the audience in a discussion of simultaneity, as well as read from BMC poets and their own works to show how the BMC project continues its influence. The main question they will discuss is how the poem, as a linear structure that unfolds in time, also capture multiple events happening at once within the poet’s imagination.

WORKSHOP – Room 230
Fritz Horstman: Interacting with Color: A Practical Guide to Josef Albers’s Color Experiments

Working from Josef Albers’s famous “Interaction of Color,” as well as Horstman’s new book “Interacting with Color” we will experiment with such color phenomena as simultaneous contrast and the illusion of transparency. No prior experience is required. Just as Albers’s Black Mountain College students did, we will use colored paper, scissors, and glue.

1:15 – 2:15pm 
MANHEIMER ROOM
Keynote Panel with Jeff Arnal, Michael Beggs, Frédérique Davreux-Hébert, Tyler Housholder, and Alice Sebrell, co-curators of Imaginary Landscapes: Black Mountain College Architecture and Design

SESSION NO. 1 – Manheimer Room
Moderator: Heather South
David Silver: Ebbe Borregaard comes and goes

On October 2nd, 1956, Ebbe Borregaard arrived at BMC with a hazy interest in poetry. Because fall classes had neither started nor been announced, he spent his first three days exploring the Lake Eden campus and environs. Ebbe toured “upper campus,” including the Studies Building, fantastic and falling apart; the library, whose collection, once extraordinary, was looted without mercy; the all-but-abandoned farm, and some residential cottages, especially the one entirely covered in Kudzu, a fast-growing vine that engulfed great chunks of campus. He also toured “lower campus,” which had been sold two years earlier, but had not yet been occupied. Ebbe peered through the windows of the locked up kitchen and dining room and walked through the abandoned but still intact North and South Lodges, where he found the fabled free store and quickly swapped his army clothes for a t-shirt and blue jeans. With poetry students, Ebbe went to the town of Black Mountain where he was taught to shoplift for his dinner; with painting students he went to Ma Peek’s, where he experienced and enjoyed the best conversations of his life. On his fourth day, Ebbe and every other member of the campus community were summoned to the cottage of poet, professor, and rector Charles Olson, who stood up, cleared his throat, and announced, “The college is closing.” On his fifth and final day at BMC, Ebbe jumped into the student- and faculty-filled car caravan and headed out west to try something new in San Francisco. This talk, told entirely through storytelling, draws upon prospective student Ebbe Borregaard’s five days at BMC and delivers an imaginary landscape of the college during its final act.

Becky Alexander (with Jeff Gunderson, and Alex Landry): Black Mountain College in the West: The Influence of Black Mountain College within Bay Area Creative Communities

The influence of Black Mountain College on postwar American art is often narrated through the achievements of individual artists and writers. This presentation instead examines how Black Mountain’s distinctive ethos circulated through the artistic and literary communities of the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1940s, 1950s, and beyond. By tracing the connections through figures who carried the College’s ideas of artistic experimentation and community-based pedagogy westward, this paper argues that Black Mountain’s Bay Area legacy was less a matter of institutional inheritance than of community formation. Through overlapping networks of artists, poets, and educators, Black Mountain’s experimental spirit found a home in the like-minded creative communities of Northern California, shaping artistic practice, teaching, and communal life.

SESSION NO. 2 – Room 120
Moderator:
Kyriakos Apostolidis: Bauhaus’ legacy in art education: towards an onto-epistemological account

Can artistic practice be a means by which to come-to-know through creating? Thinking of the language of architecture in terms of design, Zeynep Çelik Alexander centers the project of modernity on its persuasion of merging aesthetics with epistemology, finding its provenance in the Bauhaus’s pedagogy and legacy. Dubbed kinesthetic knowledge, this non-propositional, body-based mode of knowledge views movement as productive and intelligent, a primary means of sense-making. With leading figures such as László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, and Hans Hofmann, the experimental spirit of this tradition finds new ground in the art education of the US, and sets the foundation for the American Avant-Garde. With the artist’s body as the first medium, this idea was further radicalized in the movement of performance, and examples such as “Theater Piece No. 1,” while reflecting on Oskar Schlemmer’s Theater of Totality. Through a passage from modernity to post-modernity, kinesthetic knowledge finds a singularity in new materialism and the manifestation of an onto-epistemological account in arts—a lens with which to see being much like knowing as a process of becoming.

Matthew J. Ely: Credit without Credit Hours: The Black Mountain College Model of Curricular Progression

The “credit hour” is the building block of higher education. For every course a student takes, they earn some number of credit hours toward a total required for graduation. Black Mountain College was one of the few exceptions to this norm. Credits were not counted and moving toward graduation required passing a series of comprehensive exams. This paper describes how academic advancement worked for students at Black Mountain, how it connects to more traditional structures of American higher education, and what contemporary higher education could learn from its example.

Bradley Walters: Opening Eyes through Hands-On Making: From Black Mountain College to the Univ. of Florida

When he joined the faculty at the University of Florida in 1959, Bernie Voichysonk had just completed his MFA at Yale under the tutelage of Josef Albers. Like his teacher, Voichysonk sought “to open eyes” of students, allowing them to recognize spatial and formal relationships through drawing, model building, and material-based constructions. Rigorous physical model building and analog drawing remain central to UF’s educational model. This study aims to critically reflect on the connections between Albers, Voichysonk, Black Mountain College, and UF. The presentation will provide fresh insight into the value of physical making within our increasingly AI-dominated world while recognizing the limitations of formal approaches initiated by Albers and proposing alternatives that seek to engage place, performance, and design outcomes in a more robust way.

SESSION NO. 3 – Room 206
Moderator: Nan Zander

Brian D Crisp: Take A Seat: Making Place and Placemaking at Black Mountain College

“Why does every would-be designer start out with a chair?” Josef Albers addressed this question during student Henry Bergman’s Graduation First Day Exam on January 23, 1947, explaining the particular challenge presented to design students. Albers remarked, “A chair is the hardest thing in the world to make.” Chairs are critical clues for understanding the narrative of designing and making at Black Mountain College. An examination of Clara Porset (BMC 1934) and Molly Gregory (1941–1947) reveals Black Mountain’s educational philosophy and praxis. Referencing bell hooks and Doreen Massey, we see chairs as social and political spaces. We identify chair variations, shaped by aesthetic and political ideas from Europe’s inner-war functioning Bauhaus and Latin America’s anti-imperialist movement, designed to meet the needs of living in the rural Appalachian mountains. These works underscore a grammar of individual ideas and communal responses. Turning to the post-Black Mountain careers of Porset and Gregory continues to offer insights into the accomplishments and struggles of creators with multivalent identities, applying the grammar of placemaking to envision inclusive and creative ideas for community.

Rachel de Cuba: Migration & Weaving at Black Mountain College

“Migration & Weaving at Black Mountain College” will examine the role of placemaking within the weaving workshop at BMC. Through the practices and material explorations of faculty and students, this presentation considers how artists adapted their processes to reflect their new circumstances. A close look at selected works and assignments will further explore the dual role of weaving as both a studio practice and an expression of human migration. This presentation will reflect on how integration and assimilation play out in the development of the weaving workshop and the practices of those who worked within it.

Aaron Ernst: What the Building Remembers: Forensic Architectural Examination of the Studies Building

How can a building serve as an archive of its own making? This paper examines the Studies Building at Black Mountain College through findings from an active forensic investigation and historic restoration planning effort. Drawing on historic photographs, archival accounts, and direct observation of current conditions, this paper reads the building fabric as construction evidence. Framing patterns, material assemblies, roof drainage, ventilation strategies, exterior asbestos-cement/transite panels, altered openings, murals, inscriptions, and later Camp Rockmont-era adaptations all reveal decisions made across time. Together, these layers allow us to reconstruct portions of the building’s construction history that documents alone cannot recover. Current restoration planning must therefore distinguish original fabric from later intervention, retain or replicate significant materials, recover the building’s visual character, and preserve layered histories without erasing the evidence of use, adaptation, and change. By reading the building as builders, this paper considers how preservation practice can honor a structure whose value lies not only in its design, but in its making. To study the Studies Building’s construction is to study Black Mountain College at full scale: a community learning, adapting, and building in real time.

SESSION NO. 4 – Room 207
Robert Creeley Centennial (Panel Three)
Moderator: Jeff Gardiner

Thade Jude Correa: Speech is a Mouth: Notes on the Musical / Experimentalist Poetics of Robert Creeley

How can literary studies engage with poetry’s sonic dimensions, especially as exemplified by poets like Robert Creeley, who thought of his own work as a kind of literary music? This study explores Creeley’s poetry and asks how poetic sound performs and enacts meaning. In considering this, the work of figures like Friedrich Kittler, Roland Barthes, and Vijay Iyer are drawn upon to demonstrate how Creeley’s poetry can be understood both in musical terms and as music. Specifically, Iyer’s concept of experientialist music is shown to converge with Creeley’s poetics and is applied to readings of Creeley’s poems to illuminate the role and function of sound in his work. This project demonstrates both how Creeley’s work can be seen (or “heard”) as a musical and experientialist project in its own right; it also shows that the lens of sound studies can offer an alternative pathway to understanding contemporary literary art and criticism, and one that possesses immense potential.

Josh Hoeynck: “Main Flaw is Inadequate Organization”: Robert Creeley and Larry Eigner’s Publishing and Correspondence

While studies to date have focused primarily on reading Eigner through the lens of disability studies, which is necessary, this talk will focus primarily on the back and forth editorial operations between Eigner and Creeley to suggest that Eigner’s attentiveness to reality make him a close collaborator in the project of Black Mountain Poetry and its connections to the radical openness of Black Mountain College. While Eigner’s disability meant that he had to rely on friends to organize his writings into the logical shape of a poetry book, the intensity of his verse makes him one of the most rewarding of the Black Mountain Poets. This talk will examine Creeley’s and Eigner’s editorial efforts surrounding both From the Sustaining Air and Eigner’s publications in The Black Mountain Review. When Kenneth Rexroth dropped off the editorial board of the Black Mountain Review in 1954, Creeley proposed to Charles Olson that Eigner be the replacement. Olson agreed. While Eigner was not able to take up the position, Creeley’s and Olson’s desire to have Eigner as one of the editors for the magazine is telling: both saw him as one of “the company,” a member of the Black Mountain Poets who approached reality with senses of intensity, perceptive openness, and fierce autonomy.

Eireene Nealand: A Bite Through the Possible: Creeley’s Engagement with Movement and Modality

This paper will explore Creeley’s statement, “I write to move in words,” reflecting on how motion helped his ongoing play between the possible and actual. Along the way two sources will be important: William Carlos’ Williams, writing about how poets get “words [to] bite their way [into] being actual/having the form of motion” and current-day physiologists, who write about how motion’s orientation toward the future allows us to intermittently sample from sensations leaving room for simulative dips into the possibility and desire.

SESSION NO. 5 – Room 230
Moderator: Michael Beggs

Elizabeth Cronin: Education as Life: Molly Gregory and Design/Build at Black Mountain College

Molly Gregory came to Black Mountain College when it moved to the Lake Eden campus in 1941. Formed in the late years of the Great Depression, Black Mountain operated on razor-thin margins from the day it opened, and Gregory immediately took a leading role in both cultivating and shaping their limited resources. She built many buildings on campus, ran the work programs, grew and maintained the farm, and through her woodworking practice played an integral role in centering making and craft at the heart of Black Mountain’s communal culture. Though Gregory made a profound impact at Black Mountain, shaping many of the collective craft practices it has come to be known for, little has been written about her work at the school, and even less about her pedagogical contributions. This presentation begins with archival research to frame Molly Gregory’s expansive role in sustaining Black Mountain’s Lake Eden campus. It then traces the influence of her woodworking practice—born from the necessity of operating in a place with little financial backing—to current design/build practices in architecture education. Through her work, Gregory centered building as a core tenet of Black Mountain’s educational identity (both in reality and myth) and established thrift and making (do with) what you have, craft, collective authorship, and community growth as precursors to contemporary design/build pedagogy. Specifically, this presentation explores the role of scarcity as a pedagogical tool; a tool wielded by Gregory to shape communities and ways of living that embodied the most radical innovation of Black Mountain College: education as life.

W Jason Miller: Poet Langston Hughes Visits BMC: Part II

In 1949, “Negro History Week” 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). This presentation offers a full overview of Hughes’s first meeting with the future Nina Simone. Using archival notes from Hughes’s personal papers, the presentation includes new aspects of Hughes’s stay, including the books and song lyrics he donated to the College, and a new letter from Joseph Albers (dated February 10, 1049) thanking Hughes for his “lecture.” Widening BMC 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.

Amy Jean Porter: Adventures of Ideas: Anni Albers and Alfred North Whitehead 

In the February 1947 issue of the Magazine of Art, Anni Albers published “Design: Anonymous and Timeless.” Written while Albers was on leave from Black Mountain College, the article posits a radical vision for the role of designer: to be unknown. Only in this way, Albers argued, can the designer escape the lure of trends and fashion, creating objects of lasting value. It is a unique position, running counter to consumerism, which requires designers to be responsible for the longevity of the objects they bring into the world. Albers featured a revised version of the article in her 1959 book On Designing, placing it as the very first of ten writings. While the idea of an anonymous designer may have originated at the Bauhaus, where Albers was a member of the weaving workshop from 1922 to 1930, her article draws more ambitiously on the writings of British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who featured frequently in her correspondence with Ted Dreier. This paper explores how Anni Albers adapted the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead to her own designs. Albers was particularly taken with Whitehead’s chapter on “Foresight” in Adventures of Ideas, in its implications for society, and, more directly, for its relevance to handweaving and textile design. In aligning herself with Whitehead’s philosophy, Albers believed that every creation should be at the service of an envisioned, meaningful world.

SESSION NO. 1 – Manheimer Room
Moderator: Michael Beggs
Justin Childress: The Visible World Loosens: Three Microgeographies of Black Mountain Design

Josef Albers’s oft-repeated aim “to open eyes” suggests a pedagogy of perception rather than a style of making. This presentation considers that idea through three sites in Dallas, TX, where Black Mountain College and Bauhaus afterlives appear not as direct inheritance alone, but as forms of architectural and design attention. Temple Emanu-El, with Anni Albers’s woven ark panels and György Kepes’s stained glass, becomes a site of relation: textile, light, ritual, and modernist collaboration held in architectural space. The Dallas Museum of Art’s Albers holdings offer a second field, where glass, color, wall, screen, and window turn perception into a question of mediation. I. M. Pei’s Dallas City Hall, shaped by the Bauhaus-inflected modernism he encountered through long association with Walter Gropius at Harvard, becomes the third: a civic structure where trained looking gives way to civic judgment. Rather than following a single physical path, this presentation treats each site as a small field of architectural and autoethnographic observation. Moving from sanctuary to civic architecture, the project asks how ideas rooted in one experimental educational environment travel into other places, and how those places alter their meaning. What does design teach us to foreground? What do we mistake for background? And what might we see when the visible world loosens enough to show its structure?

Sophia Garner: Built from Black Mountain College

“Built from Black Mountain College” aims to fill a gap in the college’s architectural legacy and thus its future: shifting attention from the campus to the architectural practices and projects pursued by alumni and teachers in various locations after their experience in the Appalachian Mountains. The project works with archival material, focusing on the evolution of practices, complemented by contemporary documentation of remaining buildings. The emphasis lies on the built form, while also drawing on values that make BMC exceptional: an attitude of fearless interdisciplinarity, autonomous making, generative community, without compromising high quality design. It aims to result in a guide to appreciating the architectural remnants of BMC, while also serving as a handbook for current students, educators and practitioners.

Katie Horak: After Black Mountain: Stoller, Guermonprez, Marquis, and a Career-Making Collaboration at Temple Rodef Sholom

This paper will investigate the design legacy of Black Mountain College through a single architectural commission: the Temple Rodef Sholom in San Rafael, California. In 1960, temple leadership selected the architectural partnership of Marquis & Stoller to design their synagogue. Claude Stoller was a BMC student from 1938-42, where he studied architecture with A. Lawrence Kocher and participated in the construction of the Studies Building. Bob Marquis was the brother of Lucian Marquis (BMC,1940-42) and brother-in-law of Jane (Slater) Marquis (BMC, 1940-45). At Temple Rodef Sholom, Marquis & Stoller’s chosen collaborators included Black Mountain connections, friends they knew from Pond Farm, or other local artisans: Edith Heath, Jane Marquis, Trude Guermonprez, Anne Knorr, Bella Friedman, and Victor Ries. Guermonprez and Marquis noted that the architects gave them free artistic reign, a direct expression of the progressive BMC ethos. In the case of Jane Marquis, this commission was her first stained glass project, and would launch a career that included hundreds of projects over 50 years. This paper will also serve as documentation of a significant building that no longer exists; it was demolished (along with all of its artworks) in 2022.

SESSION NO. 2 – Room 205
Moderator:
Dima Alekseyev: Anatomy of an Artistic Experiment: The Parallel Paths of BMC and the ART-OVRAG Festival in Rural Russia breathes in repetition

As the creator, curator, and active participant of the ART-OVRAG festival, I have observed a striking conceptual alignment between my project and the phenomenon of Black Mountain College. Our practice was driven by the exact same fundamental questions: how do creative ideas take root in specific places, and how, in turn, do these locations shape the evolution of the ideas themselves? Both initiatives flourished on the periphery, far from established cultural capitals, turning a provincial setting into a strategic advantage. ART-OVRAG re-imagined the industrial town of Vyksa, transforming its streets into a living laboratory and demonstrating that the synthe sis of art, contemporary design, and interdisciplinary learning can inspire new ways of thinking and life attitudes. While the festival in Vyksa still exists today, over time, due to shifts in state policy, it has heavily altered its nature, losing its original enlightening spirit. This closely mirrors the history of BMC, where institutional transformations and policy changes also led to the conclusion of the college’s original vision and its ultimate closure. The fundamental parallel between the paths of BMC and ART-OVRAG lies in the fact that both projects became simultaneously physical places and creative forces that continue to inspire new ways of thinking today.

Ryan Johnson: Open Air Learning, An Introduction

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, I was required to teach in person. Although uncomfortable, I improvised. Without walls separating learning from environing, I became increasingly attuned to campus life. Never had I experienced classes so alive. Today, I teach almost all my classes outside, usually sitting in the Adirondack chairs circling fire pits. I am now so convinced of the magic of teaching philosophy outside that I have no intention of going back inside, and I think others should try it. To address the usual resistances and excuses, I formulated a pedagogy called “Open Air Learning (OAL),” named to distinguish it from related forms of outdoor education. In this session I will introduce some principles of OAL and think through ways that others might also begin to see what I call the “just outside” not only as potential for rich learning but as where the best learning occurs. Finally, I am interested in exploring ways that OAL was practiced at Black Mountain College (BMC) because I am starting a book project on pedagogy at BMC.

Alejandro Loureiro Lorenzo: Relational Structures: Black Mountain College, Bauhaus, VKhUTEMAS, and the Organization of Meaning

The paper considers how Black Mountain College, Bauhaus, and VKhUTEMAS each challenged conventional disciplinary boundaries by treating artistic production as a mode of structuring experience rather than as a specialized field separated from everyday life. Across these institutions, education was conceived through relations between materials, bodies, spaces, images, and social organization. Architecture and design therefore functioned not only as formal practices, but as frameworks for constructing new conditions of learning, perception, and collective life. The presentation focuses on the shared concern with constructive thinking, material experimentation, spatial organization, and interdisciplinary exchange. In this context, pedagogy becomes architectural: it organizes relationships, directs attention, and produces environments in which meaning emerges through interaction rather than isolated instruction.
Situating Black Mountain College within these broader networks of modernist experimentation, the paper proposes that its legacy extends beyond the history of a single institution.

SESSION NO. 3 – Room 206
Place, Product, and Person at Black Mountain College
Moderator: Rachel Pickert

Jared Arredondo: Shaped by Stone: Architecture as Cultural and Material Education

Black Mountain College is often remembered for its interdisciplinary approach to art and education, yet its architectural significance also lies in how students encountered space, material, labor, and community as interconnected forms of learning. This presentation examines the college through an architectural lens, asking how its educational model shaped students’ understanding of the built environment and what its legacy can contribute to contemporary architectural education. The research identifies four values cultivated through embodied work: care, honesty, connection, and patience. Together, they frame Black Mountain College as an educational environment and material record. Among the many construction tasks undertaken by the community, its stonework offers a revealing record. Stone resists speed, preserves traces of error and correction, and provides a contemporary point of comparison. Through archival research, site observation, and stone-carving practice, this presentation argues for architectural education grounded in interdisciplinary freedom, material literacy, mentorship, and responsibility.

Rachel Pickert: Place, Product, and Person at Black Mountain College

This past May I was invited to stay in the Black Mountain College Studies Building while gathering archival resources to support the foundation’s preservation efforts. This took place just days after receiving my Bachelor of Architecture, the end reward for five years of long days, late nights, and high pressure projects. I was transported to the quiet stillness of the Appalachian mountains and it took only stepping out of my car to see that the Black Mountain campus was a retreat from the world. I continued to learn that the goal of establishing the school was to escape the formal structure of higher education and change the intellectual discourse of the time. In my visit I was able to escape the hurry and ever encroaching technology of our time. I saw academics leaving their expertise to strengthen other skills in construction and homesteading. Both professors and students were learning and exploring. This cross-pollination of people from anywhere is how humans are grown and in our age this personal connection is rare yet vital. When looking forward, the opportunity to step away from the screen and explore ourselves while also forming one another is extremely inviting.

Keif Schleifer: The Landscape is the Teacher

Black Mountain College sat in a valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, beside a lake surrounded by forest. That setting was not incidental to the education at BMC. The mountains, water, and land were woven into daily life and learning, a presence students and faculty alike found nurturing, restorative, and generative. Grounded in Dewey’s conviction that learning is a transaction between a person and a living environment, the college treated its surroundings as a partner in education, not a backdrop. Faculty were as moved by the setting as were students. Max Dehn, writing to Josef Albers, praised “the beauty of the surrounding nature which, I think, is of the greatest value to transform young and old people who live in it.” Visiting in 1941, Albert Einstein told the community, “… you are in such close contact with nature here. You are getting near to science in a way it should be generally done.” For present architectural education, where the site is often approached as a design problem to be solved, BMC offers a different disposition to adopt: one in which the environment becomes a condition for learning, an idyllic setting that gives more than it takes and shapes how and what we learn.

SESSION NO. 4 – Room 207
Moderator: Margi Conrads
Kira Houston: Medium, Method, Memory: Stories from Black Mountain COLL(A)GE 

This presentation will highlight a non-linear tapestry of stories drawn from BMCM+AC’s recent exhibition, Black Mountain COLL(A)GE, which was the first museum exhibition to focus exclusively on the theme of collage at BMC. Floating behind the scenes of this project was an expansive constellation of fascinating and brilliant stories from BMC and beyond; stories from Suzi Gablik’s time living with René Magritte, William McGee’s first encounter with Robert Rauschenberg at Lake Eden, Mary Parks Washington’s ongoing collaborative poetry practice, and much more. Exhibition curator Kira will illuminate these stories for a wider audience, aiming to foster a greater appreciation for many of the under-recognized artists that became a major part of the exhibition.

Cait McCarthy: Not an Unlikely Place: Black Mountain College and the Pedagogies of the Appalachian South

Black Mountain College is often described as a European modernist experiment that was transplanted into the American South. This paper challenges that interpretation by re-contextualizing BMC within a broader tradition of alternative education that had already emerged across the Appalachian South. Before BMC opened in 1933, institutions including the John C. Campbell Folk School (est. 1925), the Penland School of Craft (est. 1929), and the Highlander Folk School (est. 1932) developed experimental pedagogical models focused on ideas of collective labor, craft production, and communal learning. While the mission of each school differed, from political education to craft training and community development, they all shared a strong commitment to “learning by doing”. This paper identifies the pedagogical ideas that connected these schools across different political and cultural contexts, arguing that Black Mountain College was not an anomaly or an imported experiment, but one version of broader regional traditions of learning through making. Finally, the paper considers how these pedagogical traditions persist in the American South today via contemporary alternative education models, such as Rural Studio.

Carissa Pfeiffer: Creative Crossroads: Black Mountain College and the Public Library

Drawing from the archives of Buncombe County Public Libraries, this presentation explores how Black Mountain College students and faculty engaged with the public library system based in Asheville, particularly after 1942, when a private Friends of the Library group formed and supported initiatives to increase access to arts and culture for the general public. For BMC students and faculty, the main library in downtown Asheville became a potential site of inspiration, as well as a venue to perform and exhibit their work for a general audience. Notable examples included the library hosting an exhibition of everyday object design curated by W.P. Jennerjahn, an exhibition of Josef Albers’s work shortly after his resignation from BMC, and performances of student plays and concerts. The presentation will place BMC in a larger context of progressive social programs and attention to arts and culture that characterized the WW2 and postwar era locally. By aligning themselves with the public library, BMC students and faculty demonstrated a commitment to public community engagement that has been under-explored in existing research.

SESSION NO. 5 – Room 230
Moderator: Sadie Bowen

Omar Ali: At Home in the Studio: Unmaking the Design Critique

Architecture studios are known to be a demanding space of labor and production where students live, work, and eat; effectively serving as a “second home.” Yet, the spatial organization of the studio often reproduces institutional hierarchies and disciplinary structures. In the HOMEMAKING directed research lab at Syracuse University’s School of Architecture, students rearranged their studio space into The Living Room. By adopting a domestic model within an institutional setting, students begin to feel at home while working collectively, flattening the hierarchy between students and faculty, and creating space for radical stances. This presentation will also look at other radical pedagogical spaces: the living room of faculty members Fritz and Gisela Moellenhoff at Black Mountain College’s Blue Ridge campus in the 1930’s, Womanhouse by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, and The Jane Addams Hull House. In conclusion, this paper argues for a reconsideration of the spatial politics of architectural education: how we teach, what we teach, and where we teach.

Derek Fenner: Outside the Margins: Black Mountain Poetics and the Design of Scholarly Space

This paper examines the work of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, M.C. Richards, and John Wieners through the conference theme of architecture and design, arguing that Black Mountain poetics offers a model not only for understanding literary space but also for reimagining the architecture of scholarship itself. Drawing on Olson’s field poetics, Duncan’s imaginative spaces of dwelling, Richards’s philosophy of making, and Wieners’s attention to lived and marginal experience, the paper will explore how Black Mountain writers conceived of artistic form as a dynamic process of relation, inhabitation, and transformation. Their work invites us to think of poems as environments rather than objects and of meaning as something produced through movement, encounter, and unfolding. Presented in an accordion-fold format that combines text and visual elements, the paper itself serves as an experiment in arts-based scholarship, considering what it means to move scholarship outside the margins of conventional academic presentation while remaining attentive to the College’s commitment to experimentation across disciplines.

Dominika Tylcz and Heather South: Navigating the BMC campus with disability

This joint presentation by Heather South and Dominika Tylcz considers the topic of disabled experience at Black Mountain College and will unfold in two parts: a panel presentation and a short exercise of “walk with constraints” on the historical Lake Eden campus on the third day of the conference. The spoken presentation will examine the recollections and artistic work of BMC students and teachers who navigated the campus with an illness or an embodied setback: Hazel Larsen Archer, Susan Weil, Annie Albers, Nathaniel French and Sam Brown. By examining photographs and existing written sources, the presentation seeks to reimagine the sensorial and embodied emplacement within the community, environment and architecture of the college from the perspective of disability. This approach will be supplemented with a speculative walking methodology of research, which we will re-enact with interested participants on the third day of the conference. Through this inquiry, we hope to shed light on the access challenges of the historic BMC and networks of mutual support that emerged to offset them.

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

Dima Alekseev is a multidisciplinary artist. He graduated from the Moscow State University of Design and Technology. From 1997 to 2026, he participated in over 50 group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide, including solo exhibitions in New York City. He was the creator, organizer, and curator of contemporary art festivals in Russia. 

Becky Alexander and Jeff Gunderson are archivists with the SFAI Legacy Foundation and Archive where they work to preserve the 150-year history of the now-closed San Francisco Art Institute.

Omar Ali is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Syracuse Architecture. He is co-founder of NO—OFFICE, an architecture and research practice, and co-director of the HOMEMAKING research lab at Syracuse. Prior to joining Syracuse Architecture, he was the inaugural Tulane Architecture and Urbanism Fellow for 2021-23. His research centers on housing and domestic typologies of the Global South, with particular attention to non-Western frameworks of collective space.

Kyriakos Apostolidis was born in Drama, Greece, and is a movement-based artist and researcher and founder of the research project Morphoplastics. He holds an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an Integrated Master in Painting & Drawing from the School of Visual & Applied Arts at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He studied Fine Arts at the Universidad de Granada. 

Jeff Arnal is a percussionist, writer, curator, and community organizer working across experimental music and interdisciplinary performance. Since 2016, he has served as Executive Director of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Selected curatorial and writing projects include Points in Space: Performance at Black Mountain College (2025) and Between Form and Content: Perspectives on Jacob Lawrence + Black Mountain College (2018).

Jared Arredondo, an architectural designer and researcher, investigates how architectural education can cultivate care, honesty, connection, and patience through sustained engagement with materials, construction, craft and experimentation allowing students to encounter resistance, uncertainty, and consequences of making at full scale. Jared holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Kennesaw State University and plans to continue his studies in preservation and adaptive re-use.

Onur Ayaz is a poet and educator. He is Assistant Professor of English at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey and serves as the Developmental Reading Coordinator. Onur oversees the integration of reading and literacy activities into curricular, pedagogical, and lesson planning activities. He is currently working on a series of projects about the Black Mountain author Paul Metcalf, and his poetic writing relating to baseball.

Michael Beggs is an architectural designer, interdisciplinary artist, and independent scholar, who has studied Black Mountain College since 2010. In collaboration with Julie J. Thomson, he co-curated the 2023 BMCM+AC exhibition Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez and Their Students and co-wrote the exhibition catalogue of the same name. He is one of the co-curators of the current exhibition Imaginary Landscapes: Black Mountain College Architecture and Design. 

Tessa Bolsover is a poet, publisher, and interdisciplinary scholar. Her research centers post-1945 North American poetry and the relationship between language and the senses. She holds an MFA from Brown University and is currently a doctoral candidate at Duke. In Spring 2026, she was awarded a research fellowship at Yale’s Beinecke Library. Her first book of poetry, Crane, was published by Black Ocean in 2025. She is also a founding co-editor of auric press.

S. Boone is the author of Biblical Proportions: Poems (Kelsay Books, 2026) and Understanding Jorie Graham (U of South Carolina P, 2025). He teaches English at Harding University and preaches for the Magness Church of Christ.

Shannon E. Brown, AIA, has been practicing architecture for over 25 years. As a principal at John G. Waite Associates, Architects, she leads restoration and rehabilitation efforts for some of the firm’s most prominent historic preservation efforts. Ms. Brown oversaw the award-winning restoration of the Fort Ticonderoga Pavilion and is currently working on the restoration and rehabilitation of the Basilica of Saint Lawrence (Asheville, NC) which was designed and constructed by Rafael Guastavino.

Justin Childress is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. Originally trained as a graphic designer, he is an interdisciplinary designer, educator, and researcher focused on the intersections of visual language, urban memory, and reflective design/build pedagogy. His personal research explores walking as inquiry, memory objects, and the metaphysics of cities.

Nyssa Collins is a Knoxville based stop-motion animator, performer, and puppet maker. She uses discarded objects, puppets, and toys to conduct very serious research about phenomenal reality and the nature of being. She has an MFA in Time Based Art from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Thade Jude Correa is a writer, scholar, teacher, musician. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in English Language and Literature at IU Bloomington, specializing in modern and contemporary poetry. His poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in various publications, including Bitter Oleander, Asymptote, Soul-Lit, Levekunst, Credo, and Poetry City, USA, Vol. 4. 

Brian D. Crisp is a North Carolina native with degrees from Furman, Southern Seminary, and Vanderbilt. He has served schools and universities in the US and Europe, focusing on education, systems thinking, and the arts. Currently, he is Curator-in-Residence at Gallery C, showcasing NC Modernists and Black Mountain College. 

Elizabeth Cronin is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Florida, where she received her PhD, MSAS in Pedagogy, and Master of Architecture. At UF, Cronin teaches architecture design studios, design/build, and teaching methods. Her published work has appeared in Architecture Research Journal and Vorkurs—the graduate publication she co-founded in 2015. She has also taught at the University of Miami and practiced architecture in Miami, Jacksonville, and Tampa.

Rachel de Cuba is an interdisciplinary artist raised in Sebastian, FL. She received her BFA in Studio Art at Flagler College in 2013 and her MFA in Digital Art at Indiana University in 2019. Rachel de Cuba is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, FL. 

Jeff Davis’ poems have appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, the Nantahala Review, Kakalak, Iodine, the anthologies In the Belly of the Beast and Far From the Centers of Ambition, and other print and online journals. His book Natures: Selected Poems, 1972 – 2005 appeared in 2006.

Brook Dorsch is co-founder of Emerson Dorsch Artist Residency in Western North Carolina, an experimental residency informed by the region’s artistic, educational, and ecological histories. Along with Tyler Emerson-Dorsch, he ran Emerson Dorsch Gallery, a pillar in Miami’s art scene from 1991 to 2025.

Aaron Ernst is a Senior Project Manager at Blum Construction, leading a design-build initiative to study and restore the Black Mountain College Studies Building. His historic preservation work includes Eden Hall on the BMC campus, the Basilica of St. Lawrence, and Converse Mill. Ernst holds a degree in American History from UNC Chapel Hill.

Matthew J. Ely is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Higher Education at Indiana University Bloomington. He studies the curriculum, organization, and governance of divergent and experimental colleges, particularly those with very small student enrollments. His research examines how alternative institutional forms challenge dominant models of higher education by reimagining teaching, learning, and academic community at intimate scales.

Frédérique Davreux-Hébert is the head of workshop exhibitions at the non-profit organization Les Impatients (Montreal, Quebec), as well as an independent researcher and curator. With a master’s degree combining history of architecture and philosophy of education, she has explored the way in which the architecture of Black Mountain College embodies its educational philosophy. 

Tyler Emerson-Dorsch is a curator and writer based in Western North Carolina, and the co-founder of the Emerson Dorsch Artist Residency. From 2008 to 2025, she was a partner at Emerson Dorsch Gallery in Miami.

Patrick Farris is an artist living and working in Texas. His work explores memory, place, spirituality, and identity through photography, language, and object making. His studio practice includes darkroom processes, printmaking, and writing, as well as working in sound, wood, and various other materials.

Derek Fenner is an artist, poet, educator, and researcher based in the Carolinas. He is the author of Wild Schemes, Gossamer Nevele Grimoire, and Under New Alchemy, and co-editor of Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader. He co-founded Bootstrap Press and currently serves as assistant professor and director of art education at USC Upstate.

Maxwell Fertik is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and educator whose work addresses the material ecologies of the postindustrial age. Max attended Rhode Island School of Design and currently teaches at the IU Eskenazi School of Art and Design. As an educator, he focuses on hyperlocal, community-centered practice and innovative material use.

Seth Forrest has been studying Black Mountain College since writing his dissertation on the Black Mountain poets en route to his PhD at the University of California, Davis. Seth teaches writing and literature as assistant professor of Humanities at Coppin State University, an HBCU in Baltimore. He’s working on projects related to forms in ambient art and the matière aesthetic of BMC.

Benny Fountain is a painter and art educator from Moscow, Idaho. In 2018 he was Artist in Residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and in Spring of 2022 he was Resident Fellow at the American College of the Mediterranean in Aix-en-Provence, France. Fountain is represented by the Froelick Gallery in Portland, OR and Front Room Gallery, Spokane, WA.

Thomas Frank has served as Editor (or Co-Editor) of the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies since 2019. He lectures and writes about the past and present role of “experimental” colleges in transforming American higher education and is developing a collection of essays on major figures of Black Mountain College.

Sophia Garner is an architect with a deep interest in the intelligence of landscapes, along with a sensitivity to processes, practices and bodies they encompass. After studying architecture and landscape at TU Vienna and ETH Zürich, she co-founded UT SOL. Investigating the immediate relation of the built and the body, the practice believes in the capacity to take influence through the built form. In 2023, she joined NEWROPE, Chair of Architecture + Urban Transform., ETHZ as scientific assistant.

Michael Hettich’s poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and he has published more than a dozen books of poetry across four decades. His most recent book of poems, Waking Up Alone, won the Lena M. Shull Book Award from the NC Poetry Society.

Joshua Hoeynck’s research focuses on the confluences between process philosophy, Black Mountain poetry, and environmental criticism. His work has appeared in The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later, Contemporary Literature, and The Blackwell Companion to American Poetry. In conjunction with the Charles Olson Society, he edited Staying Open: Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences (Vernon Press).

Katie Horak is a Principal of Architectural Resource Group, an architecture firm that focuses on design in the historic built environment. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture, where she teaches courses on historic site documentation. Katie continues to research, write about, and lecture on the life and work of artist Jane Slater Marquis, graduate of BMC and stained-glass artist.

Fritz Horstman is Education Director at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, where he has worked since 2004. His book Interacting with Color: A Practical Guide to Josef Albers’s Color Experiments was published by Yale Press in 2024. He has organized exhibitions, lectured, and given workshops across Europe and the US. 

Tyler Housholder is a Senior Architect at Altura Architects and a percussionist based in Asheville, NC. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt Institute and serves on the Board of Directors of BMCM+AC.

Kira Houston (he/him) is an artist and writer based in Asheville, NC. His writing has appeared in The Worcester Review, ICOMAM Magazine, Angel City Review, and The Journal of Black Mountain College Studies. Kira works as Outreach Manager at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

Elliot Inman has presented on the following topics at past ReVIEWING BMC conferences: The Makerspace as 21st Century Bauhaus, Natasha Goldowski, John Cage, digital humanities methodologies, Anni Albers as color theorist, and Satie’s Méduse as performance art. His research brings new perspectives to BMC studies through the use of digital humanities methods and interdisciplinary analysis.

Ryan Johnson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Elon University. Ryan’s books include Deleuze, A Stoic, Phenomenology of Black Spirit (co-written with Biko Mandela Gray), and Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Practice. He is currently writing a pair of books that improvise John Coltrane – The John Brown Suite, and A Love Spinoza. All his classes occur outside, and he loves trains.

John R. Jungck is a Professor of Biological Sciences and holds a joint appointment in the Dept. of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Delaware. He has taught a course over the past twenty years entitled: “Bauhaus, Bucky, and Black Mountain College.” His art involves the 4-dimensional printing of self-assembling, self-folding, and self-expanding models of viral capsids, origami, aperiodic tessellations, and 3D nanotomography of radiolarians (re Art Forms in Nature).

Michael Kellner is a Professor at the Columbus College of Art & Design. He makes drawings, sound pieces, and sculptures inspired by iterative practices, graphic notation, and contemporary pop and avant-garde music. Additionally, he has an ongoing collaborative project with the artist Alexandra Robinson from Austin, TX called Checks and Balances. 

Craig Kerins, AIA, is co-founder of The Raleigh Architecture Company and The Raleigh Construction Company, where design, craft, and construction are held together as a single practice. He studied architecture at UNC Charlotte. Together with former UNCC classmate and business partner Robby Johnston, Kerins co-founded RACo and RCCo in 2012.

Andrew Kohn teaches string bass and music theory at West Virginia University. His research includes articles on Stefan Wolpe, rhythmic aspects of poetry by Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, and interviews with Jonathan Williams and Robert Creeley. He has also published extensively on bass-related topics. He is an active performer and composer.

Katherine Kuenzli is Professor of Art History at Wesleyan University. Her focus is on European and American modernist art and design. Her publications include books and articles on French post-Impressionism, German Expressionism, the Art Nouveau designer Henry van de Velde, the Bauhaus, colonial modernism, and mid-century American design. Her current project is a book-length study of Anni Albers.

Stephanie Kuss is an artist, educator, and filmmaker who taught for nearly two decades at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn. There, she developed curriculums inspired by BMC’s experimental spirit. Her diverse creative practice includes film, miniatures, papier-mâché sculptures, and cake decorating. Kuss now lives on a South Carolina farm, working with horses and creating art.

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. 

Adam Lion is a percussionist based in LA. He has worked closely with a diverse spectrum of artists including Harold Budd, bang on a can, Katherine Young, Laura Steenberge, Tim Feeney, Lets Paint TV, Evan Lipson, Jeonghyeon Joo, and Nief-Norf. He holds an MFA from Calarts, an MM from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a BA from Southern Oregon University. 

Basil Lloyd-Moffett is a doctoral student in English at the University of Virginia; he is particularly interested in 20th-century poetry. His criticism has appeared in Chicago Review.

Alejandro Loureiro Lorenzo is an artist based in New York. Developed between Europe and the US, his work focuses on the ways images acquire meaning through context, circulation, and interpretation. His work has been exhibited internationally.

Cait McCarthy is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Auburn University School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, where she coordinates and teaches the first-year foundation curriculum, including representation and studio courses. Her research examines the divide between architectural education and professional practice and explores alternative modes of collaboration that bridge practice and pedagogy.

Jason Miller is a Distinguished Professor and public scholar at NC State University. His work has been featured on the ABC and NBC National Evening News, CNN, BBC, NPR, and The Rachel Maddow Show.  Supported by a Fellowship at the National Humanities Center, his fourth book is Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power. His film Origin of the Dream (about MLK’s first “I Have a Dream” speech in Rocky Mount, NC) is airing on PBS.

Kate Tarlow Morgan, dancer, author, historian is sole archivist of The Rhythms Fundamentals® based on   the study of human and animal movement. She is writing a 100-year history of somatic movement educators who participated in the radical reforms of the 1920s. As a performer, Kate presents work at Movement Arts of Gloucester, MA. and the Gloucester Writers Center.

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.  

Miriam Nichols is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. She is the author of Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside (Alabama, 2010) and A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser: Mechanic of Splendor (Palgrave, 2019).

Mike Oleon is a puppeteer-turned-anatomy-educator and the founder of Minimo Kinetics, where he builds tensegrity teaching models for bodyworkers. He is the founder and former artistic director of Rough House Puppet Arts. He built the tensegrity humanoid Althea for permanent display at BodyWorlds Berlin, holds a fellowship at the Stephen M. Levin Biotensegrity Archive, and has co-taught with Tom Myers of Anatomy Trains.

Carissa Pfeiffer is a Librarian in Buncombe County Special Collections, the local history and archives division of the Buncombe County Public Library System, based at Pack Memorial Library in downtown Asheville. A former co-editor of the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies and former staff member of BMC Museum + Arts Center, she holds an MSLIS from Pratt Institute as well as undergraduate degrees in English and Studio Art from the University of Georgia.  

Rachel Pickert is a multidisciplinary artist and independent scholar. She earned her Bachelor of Architecture from Kennesaw State University with a primary interest in how architecture materializes the socio-cultural context of a time. Pickert has contributed to the documentation of historic structures, and has presented research on themes of phenomenology, Christian architecture, and sacred and profane space. 

Joseph Pizza is Associate Professor of English at Belmont Abbey College, where he teaches courses in technical and creative writing, modern and postmodern poetics, and African American Studies. In addition to articles, poems, and translations, he is the author most recently of the critical study Dissonant Voices: Race, Jazz, and Innovative Poetics in Midcentury America, and the chapbook Promissory Notes.

Alessandro Porco is an associate professor of English at UNC Wilmington. He is coeditor of The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry (UNC Press in association with Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2025). He is currently completing a critical edition of the poems of Jane Mayhall.

Amy Jean Porter is assistant curator and digital manager at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. She has written about the art and writings of the Alberses, most recently for the catalogue of the exhibition Anni Albers: Constructing Textiles. She holds a BA from Yale University, where she studied art history and studio art, and an MPhil in textual and visual studies from Trinity College Dublin.

Nancy A. Rankin, AIA, LEED AP, is a principal with John G. Waite Associates, Architects overseeing the firm’s New York City office. Her commitment to incorporating new compatible uses, modern building technologies, and sustainable design practices in a manner that respects and enhances the character-defining features of a historic building has defined her approach to preservation throughout her architectural career. Ms. Rankin led the firm’s feasibility study for the Studies Building at Black Mountain College.

Keif Schleifer is Principal of KSDesign and teaches architecture at Kennesaw State University, with courses spanning history and theory, building technology, material literacy in stone and masonry, and studios from first through fifth year. Experience in the building trades informs Keif’s research in cultural and construction history and the stewardship of craft knowledge. Keif holds an MS in Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology and an AB in Architecture from Wellesley College.

Alice Sebrell is Director of Preservation for Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. She earned her MFA in Photography from The Savannah College of Art and Design. Sebrell has written and spoken about Black Mountain College for multiple publications and gatherings and has curated or co-curated many exhibitions during her time at the museum. 

David Silver is a professor of Environmental Studies and Urban Agriculture at the University of San Francisco, where he also works with the USF Community Garden, the USF Food Pantry, and the USF Seed Library. In 2024, he published The Farm at Black Mountain College (Atelier Éditions and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center). He is currently working on a new storytelling project titled “Black Mountain College in San Francisco.”

Dale Smith is on the faculty of English at Toronto Metropolitan University and is the author of five books of poems, including Flying Red Horse (Talon Books, 2021) and The Size of Paradise (Knife / Fork / Book, 2024). He has edited An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson.

Heather South is Lead Archivist at Western Regional Archives, State Archives of NC.

James C. Stevens, FAIA, is the new dean of the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. From 2020 to 2025, Stevens was director of Clemson University’s Richard A. McMahan School of Architecture. He is a licensed architect and certified by the National Council of Architecture Registration Boards (NCARB) and is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA). 

Sonja Thomsen is an interdisciplinary artist in Milwaukee and Full Professor Adjunct in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work uses light to recover women whose contributions to photography were obscured in their lifetimes. She held the BMC Active Archive Residency in 2025 and the Josef Breitenbach Fellowship at the Center for Creative Photography. Her work is held at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Walker Art Center.

Lilli Treppel is a third-year dual-degree student at UNC Chapel Hill, pursuing master’s degrees in Art History and Library Science. Her research sits at the intersection of archival studies and the history of women textile and book artists in the early and mid-twentieth century, with a particular focus on how women navigated entrepreneurship and self-promotion to claim recognition in fields that systemically excluded them.

Dominika Tylcz is a curator and writer based in Queens, NY. They currently serve as a Curatorial Associate in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

John G. Waite, FAIA, FAPT, has over five decades of experience in planning for and overseeing the restoration and adaptive use of historic buildings. His projects have received more than eighty architectural and historic preservation awards, including multiple AIA Institute Honor Awards and Palladio Awards from Traditional Building Magazine. He oversaw the comprehensive restoration of Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s Baltimore Cathedral and the restoration of Thomas Jefferson’s Rotunda at the University of Virginia.

Bradley Walters, AIA, is an architect and educator. Walters is the Edward M. “Ted” Fearney Endowed Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Florida, where he is the Associate Director of Graduate Programs for the School of Architecture. Walters teaches studio design, architectural detailing, research methods, and professional practice. He earned his Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Design in Architecture from the University of Florida.

Richard Kenton Webb is an award-winning artist and educator with over 40 years of experience teaching at some of the top art schools in the UK, including the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal Drawing School in London, and the University of the Arts Plymouth.

Lauren Whitehurst is an architect, designer, educator, and co-founder of Built Lab, a Cincinnati-based architecture and design practice. She teaches foundations in architecture and interior design at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. Her teaching and creative practice center on material exploration, learning through making, and the relationship between design education and professional practice.

Tymek Woodham is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. His first book, The Poetics of Agency (Bloomsbury), 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. His next project, titled Unfamiliar Tools, is a critical history of interdisciplinarity at BMC.

Ibett Yanez del Castillo is the Director of Emerson Dorsch Artist Residency in Madison County, NC. She was the Director of Emerson Dorsch Gallery in Miami, FL. Prior to this, she served as the founding Director of the de la Cruz Collection in Miami’s Design District. She has collaborated with nonprofits, public art programs, and educational institutions, and helped develop and sustain travel scholarship programs with DASH and New World School of the Arts from 2010 to 2019.