Pictured: Anna Helgeson, work from What Light Knows.
Saturday, July 12th, 2025 at 12PM
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
Workshop $15 Per Participant
ELEMENTS OF BMC is a workshop series that explores the fundamental parts of creative practice at Black Mountain College, highlighting a range of artistic mediums and techniques. The series investigates the role of these elements in shaping the college’s legacy and lasting influence on contemporary art. Join us for an intuitive photography and collage workshop with Anna Helgeson. Please register if you plan to attend.
About the Workshop:
We are all haunted; by ideas, history, ancestors (biological and otherwise), and by animating forces we can not quite explain. This workshop will welcome the possibility of collaborating with these mysterious forces.
Participants will be led through a guided meditation (which is nothing to be afraid of) before going on an intuitive photo walk around downtown Asheville. We will then return to BMC Museum + Art Center to create collages based on the photographic discoveries collected. There is no right or wrong way to engage with this workshop, unless you allow ideas of right and wrong to control your actions, which would clearly be wrong.
No photography experience necessary. Any image capturing device will work, including your phone, a point and shoot camera, a fancy DSLR.
About Anna Helgeson:
Curiosity and wonder drive my practice. I’m compelled to create, most often using photography, performance, and collage. My projects start with a question; How did Meleva Maric’s (Einstein’s first wife) contributions to the theory of relativity get erased? What does the physical and phycological distance between reservations and high schools with “Indian” mascots look like? What can I learn from a rock? Or questions that turns into acts of resistance; How can I de-neutralize my whiteness and call attention to the invention and maintenance of race? Most recently I have been working on a long term project exploring the nature of animacy, ghostly apparitions, and the impact of pathologizing outspoken women.
Part of my process is research; seeking out archives, historic records and philosophical texts, and part of my process is intuitive with an appreciation for the vastness of what we do not know. The act of photographing and painting is also an act of devotion for me, I feel most connected to the largeness of life when engaged in these activities.
Anna received a BA from Ripon College, and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She has exhibited, performed, and lectured throughout the United States including: The Bascom: A Center for the Visual Arts (Highlands, NC), John W. Bardo Fine and Performing Arts Center (Cullowhee, NC), Holden Gallery (Swannanoa, NC),The Asheville Art Museum (Asheville, NC), The University of North Carolina, Asheville (Asheville, NC), Revolve Gallery (Asheville, NC), Work Gallery (Detroit, MI), The Milwaukee Art Museum, Lucky Star Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Union Gallery, and is featured on the website “Reframing Photography; Theory and Practice” (Routledge Press).
