Editor’s Note: Time Cycles

In September 1980, John Evarts sat down at a piano at the Bauhaus-Archiv in West Berlin to perform music he had written more than forty years earlier at Black Mountain College. The occasion was the opening of an exhibition devoted to the Bauhaus artist Georg Muche. Accompanied by singers Charles Williams and Paulette Marla, Evarts presented songs drawn largely from Let Me Have Air, a satirical musical he had created with William McCleery in 1939. Its unlikely plot followed a New York advertising man who returns home to find his country choking on tobacco smoke, industrial expansion, and increasingly authoritarian politics. The music mixed popular song, political satire, and an irreverent sense of humor. It was an unusual choice for an exhibition celebrating European modernism.

Evarts was astonished that the songs had found their way to Berlin. Written during the rise of fascism, they were now being performed in a divided Germany, in a building designed by Walter Gropius, whose ambitious plans for the Black Mountain College campus had never been realized. As Tymek Woodham explores in his contribution to this volume, the occasion brought together several intersecting histories, although the music itself resisted the tidy connections being made around it. These were funny, sometimes unruly songs, filled with contradictions that reflected the small and often contentious community in which they originated.

The story suggests something about the way we remember Black Mountain College. Its history is often told backwards, beginning with the achievements of people who became famous after leaving. John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Josef and Anni Albers, and others are essential to that history, but they were part of a much larger community. Earlier work can become a prelude to later achievements, while the contributions of lesser-known artists are understood primarily through their relationships to more celebrated figures. Evarts’s music deserves to be heard on its own terms. It tells us something about Black Mountain’s early years that the familiar history of the American avant-garde does not.

Our recent exhibitions at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center have approached some of these questions through performance and architecture. Points in Space: Performance at Black Mountain College brought together music, dance, theater, film, and visual art, along with scores, photographs, recordings, and other surviving evidence of events we can no longer experience directly. I became especially interested in the circumstances surrounding the work: the rehearsals, conversations, friendships, disagreements, and daily exchanges that made these experiments possible. 

Time Cycles, Volume 17 of the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, brings together historical research, poetry, visual art, and contemporary performance. The contributions move across different periods and places, following artistic practices as they develop, disappear, return, and acquire new meanings. They also challenge some of the assumptions through which we have come to understand Black Mountain College.

Dominika Tylcz’s essay on Ruth Asawa and modern dance is a particularly compelling example. Asawa’s looped-wire sculptures are among the most recognizable works associated with the College, yet her sustained engagement with dance has received comparatively little attention. Tylcz examines her experiences with Merce Cunningham and Elizabeth Schmitt Jennerjahn, drawing on photographs, correspondence, and the teaching practices of the late 1940s. A photocollage by Jennerjahn shows two images of Asawa dancing in the College dining hall, their bodies creating a composition of overlapping forms and open spaces. Seen alongside Asawa’s developing sculptural practice, the photograph suggests another way of understanding her relationship to space, one informed by physical movement as well as visual and material investigation.

The experience of the body also runs through Kate Tarlow Morgan’s engagement with Charles Olson’s writing on proprioception and Eric Mullis’s consideration of how a dance comes into being. Mullis is particularly interested in the discoveries that emerge through rehearsal and collaboration, and in the relationship between a work’s developing identity and its subsequent performances. These questions take on another dimension in Meredith Bove’s essay, which examines her own inheritance of the experimental traditions associated with Cage, Cunningham, Deborah Hay, Barbara Dilley, and others. Practices of chance and indeterminacy offered alternatives to established forms of artistic control, but what does it mean to pursue non-intention in 2026, amid political violence and social upheaval? Can openness become a way of avoiding responsibility? Bove does not reject the practices that shaped her. She asks what it means to work with them critically, recognizing that artistic choices are never entirely separate from the circumstances in which they are made.

Virginia Ellyn Melnyk’s Collaborative Motion takes up the relationship between movement and structure through a series of performances with deployable architectural forms made from lightweight frameworks and knitted textiles. The structures expand, contract, and change shape in response to the dancers, while their physical behavior influences the choreography. Drawing on the work of Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, and Buckminster Fuller, Melnyk develops a process in which architecture and performance become inseparable. The project is not simply an illustration of historical influences. Its particular discoveries emerge through the interaction of bodies and materials.

Other contributors look to changing environments and the ways time becomes visible. In Color As Time – Migration As Clock, Debra Ramsay translates the plumage of migratory birds passing through New York’s Central Park into abstract paintings, drawing on Josef Albers’s investigations of color and John Cage’s conceptual approaches. Her work follows recurring seasonal patterns while acknowledging the fragile ecological relationships on which they depend. Ema Lančaričová’s Concrete Phantoms examines an abandoned industrial colonnade in Eastern Europe, returning repeatedly to structures whose original purpose and imagined future have disappeared. Her photographs explore the peculiar experience of a place that appears suspended in time while undergoing continual change.

Historical research can produce equally unexpected shifts in perspective. W. Jason Miller’s essay reconstructs Langston Hughes’s February 7, 1949, visit to Black Mountain College, drawing together correspondence, itineraries, and archival records that bring new detail to an encounter largely absent from the College’s established history. Hughes stayed overnight before continuing to Asheville, where he met sixteen-year-old Eunice Waymon, later known as Nina Simone. His visit occurred during a demanding series of engagements across the segregated South. Beyond the remarkable itinerary, Miller’s research raises important questions about Black Mountain’s relationships with Black artists and intellectuals and the distance between the College’s democratic aspirations and the social realities in which it operated.

There is an interesting relationship between Miller’s research and Woodham’s examination of Evarts. Both recover episodes that complicate familiar accounts of the College, but neither is simply a matter of adding forgotten information. Woodham’s study reveals a composer whose music developed through the social and political tensions of Black Mountain’s first decade. Miller places a brief encounter within the much larger history of Hughes’s work, travel, and cultural relationships. In both cases, the details matter because they change the questions we can ask.

Ben Miller’s handmade visual essays and Heather Coker Hawkins and Maurice Moore’s Tech Play approach the relationship between artistic experience and its material form from different directions. Miller combines language, photographs, color, and found materials in compositions that ask readers to consider the physical experience of reading. Tech Play, created for the museum’s 2025 {Re}HAPPENING, moves between a live installation at the former Black Mountain College campus and its presentation through video and sound. Documentation becomes another way of organizing the experience, with its own duration and perspective. A photograph, recording, score, or film can preserve certain aspects of a work while changing others. What we encounter is shaped as much by the qualities of these materials as by the events they record.

There is no single understanding of Black Mountain College that can accommodate all these histories and practices, nor should there be. The College brought together people with different backgrounds, interests, and ambitions. Its ideals of democratic education and creative freedom were never fully realized or universally shared. Some experiments succeeded, others failed, and many led somewhere their participants could not have anticipated. The subsequent history of their work has been no less complicated.

What interests me in these contributions is their attention to things that do not fit comfortably into the established story. A satirical musical performed in Berlin four decades after its creation. A photograph of Ruth Asawa dancing. A brief visit by Langston Hughes. Artists working with movement, materials, and ideas whose meanings are still changing. These are not necessarily pieces of a larger puzzle waiting to be assembled into a complete picture. They have their own histories, and sometimes their most important contribution is to complicate what we thought we knew.

I hope this volume encourages us to look beyond the familiar stories of Black Mountain College and discover something unexpected.