August 5, 2021 | BMCM+AC {120 College Street} + Streaming – A Happening meets variety show, this premiere episode of BMC-TV connects a wide range of the Asheville area’s most innovative performers, musicians, artists, and craftspeople. For over 25 years, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC) has bridged the history of Black Mountain College with its lasting legacy in Western North Carolina and beyond. Broadcast from the stages, studios, and streets of Asheville, BMC-TV brings together our friends and collaborators who stoke the flames of experimentation sparked at BMC.
June 16, 2021 | Streaming – A conversation with artists Liz Williams and Al Murray of Southern Equality Studios, a program of the Campaign for Southern Equality. A layered installation by SES was featured in our exhibition I AM A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD. The works “You’re Welcome” and “Building a Better Table” invite participants to consider their role in creating a more equitable world, holding space for the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities.
December 16, 2021 at 7PM | BMCM+AC – The 2021 Black Mountain College Radio Artists have been selected by BMCM+AC, AshevilleFM, and Make Noise for a series of innovative works for the radio inspired by the experimental spirit of BMC artists. This year’s artists are based in Western North Carolina, with a focus on pushing the limitations of sound art, music, and performance.
July 14, 2021 | Streaming – A conversation with Sherrill Roland, featured artist in the exhibition I AM A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD, on his installation “After the Wake Up” (2017 – present). Roland is an artist based in Raleigh, NC, well known for The Jumpsuit Project, an ongoing work developed during his MFA at UNC Greensboro and inspired by his experiences with the justice system following a wrongful conviction and incarceration. In this conversation, we will discuss how “After the Wake Up” fits within the artist’s larger body of work and what citizenship means in the face of systemic violence.
July 7, 2021 | Streaming – A conversation and reading with author Aviya Kushner. Kushner’s debut poetry collection, Wolf Lamb Bomb, revives and reimagines the Book of Isaiah in an intimate conversation between woman and prophet. In the aftermath of September 11th, ongoing violence in the Middle East, and resurgent antisemitism, Kushner reflects on a Biblical understanding of humanity and justice.
Back to I AM A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD Masato Nakagawa, students with first large-scale Geodesic Dome, built under the instruction of R. Buckminster Fuller. BMC Summer Session 1949. Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina. Spaceship Earth: A Global...
Back to I AM A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD Helen M. Post (b. 1907 Bloomfiend, NJ; d. 1978), Xanti Schawinsky’s Spectodrama (digital print). Western Regional Archives, State Archives of NC. Figurative Abstraction: Constructing Identity The language of abstraction expanded...
Back to I AM A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD Ingeborg Lauterstein (b. 1923 Vienna, Austria; d. 2012 Rockport, MA), Portrait of Sewell Sillman, c. 1948-49. Oil on masonite. Courtesy of The Johnson Collection. New Citizens: Exchanging Oppression for Freedom Much of Black...
June 30, 2021 | Soundcloud – Preview an exciting new project, led by BMCM+AC’s first Active Archive resident podcaster Piers Gelly. Gelly, a collaborator on such programs as 99% Invisible and creator/host of Cellar Door, will present a sneak peek at a new Black Mountain College podcast, currently in development. Gelly will be in conversation with Black Mountain scholars Julie Levin Caro, Thomas Frank, and archivist Heather South, breaking down preconceived notions of BMC’s history and setting the stage for the eight-part documentary podcast exploring Black Mountain College as a forerunner in interdisciplinary arts, experimental education, and community-building.
103.3 Asheville FM, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and Make Noise announce an opportunity for artists living in Western North Carolina (WNC) to create new short works for broadcast on the radio. We invite artists in WNC to propose projects that reflect the experimental and innovative spirit of Black Mountain College. Artists are encouraged to take risks. Projects should be between 3-5 minutes long and no more than 12 months old. New work is strongly encouraged. The work does not have to be music. Projects can include any sound recording, cellphone recording, field recording, meditation, movement score, text score, sound collage, spoken word, audio art, experimental DJ work, etc.. The LOI deadline is June 21, 2021.
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center has been awarded $50,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a pilot project creating online access to the museum’s Permanent Collection of over 4,000 artworks and ephemera from the famed liberal arts college and experimental community.
BMCM+AC Performance Initiative Performances on Vimeo 2021 Performances BMC-TV: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY COMMUNITY ART EVENT Thursday, August 5th at 7 PM Eastern | In-person and Streaming – A Happening meets variety show, this premiere episode of BMC-TV connects a...
June 24, 2021 | Streaming – A fully improvised percussion set from Asheville-based musician Thom Nguyen, streaming from the BMCM+AC space using a drum kit and various percussion elements, in the spirit of Nguyen’s recently released album “Exits.”
June 23, 2021 | Streaming – In this presentation and conversation, members of the design team expand on the principles that guided their process, discuss the human experience of traveling through Mariposa Land Port of Entry, and emphasize the ways in which public art, architecture, and landscape design can offer connection and nurture relationships across borders.
June 9, 2021 | Streaming – A conversation with performance-related artist and scholar Christopher-Rasheem McMillan on the intersections of faith and arts. He has a joint appointment between Dance and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. His interests concern choreography in an expanded field, something that he has approached through experimental practices and creative processes in a multiplicity of formats and expressions. He uses video, performance, photography, and oral storytelling to explore themes of race, memory, queer desire, religion, personal and public mythology.
June 7 – 12, 2021 | Instagram @bmcmuseum – Artist Michelle Yi Martin takes over our Instagram, sharing her connections to Black Mountain College in conjunction with the exhibition I AM A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD. Yi Martin lives in San Francisco, but actively draws on her Korean immigrant roots in her practice. She is a multi-disciplinary artist and self-taught weaver, who characterizes her work as a conversation between convention, art, utility, adornment, material, light, solidity, and space.
May 26, 2021 | Streaming – A Faith in Arts conversation with Charles Hallisey, Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures at Harvard Divinity School. His research centers on Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Pali language and literature, Buddhist ethics, and literature in Buddhist culture. His most recent book is Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women (Harvard University Press, 2015). He is currently working on a book project entitled “Flowers on the Tree of Poetry: The Moral Economy of Literature in Buddhist Sri Lanka.”
May 13, 2021 | Streaming – Performance by the Asheville-based duo Two Way Street of new music composed by members of Nevermind the Noise, a collective of graduate student composers from New York University.
May 12, 2021 | Streaming – A conversation with Onicas Gaddis, featured artist in the exhibition I AM A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD and student of BMC alumna Sarah Carlisle Towery. We will discuss Gaddis’ painting Black Mountain (2020), his style of “Spiritual Expressionism,” the way that his identity is expressed and has evolved through his practice, and how his time spent with Towery at the Alabama Art Colony changed the trajectory of his life.
May 5, 2021 | Streaming – A conversation with award-winning photographer Andrew Feiler and Executive Director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, Brent Leggs, on Feiler’s newly published book of photographs and remembrances “A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools That Changed America” (UGA Press, 2021).
