Art, Community, and Social Activism: The Untold Story of Vera B. Williams
A Conversation with Mark Davenport
Saturday, January 27th, 2024 at 11 AM
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
Free and Open to All
In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition Vera B. Williams / STORIES (January 26 – May 11, 2024), musicologist and sociocultural historian Mark Davenport will draw on his forthcoming book (Community, Art, Education, and the Search for Meaning: From Black Mountain College to the Gate Hill Cooperative) to shed light on Williams’s life as an artist, community builder and social activist. Davenport’s intimate talk (his mother Patsy Lynch and Vera Baker were college roommates at BMC) will complement several special items in the exhibition and offer an exclusive opportunity to view archival photographs curated from his extensive digital image collection.
Image: Vera B. Williams, Untitled early drawing, ca. late 1950s. Courtesy of the Vera B. Williams Trust.
About Mark Davenport:
Dr. Mark Davenport, a professor in his 25th year at Regis University in Denver, teaches music history and interdisciplinary courses in the Fine Arts and Integrative Core. Davenport launched and directed the University’s first Music Program, steering the strategic planning, curriculum design and overall growth of music at Regis through its first two decades, for which he was recognized in 2021 with the University’s “Outstanding Service Award.” His teaching and scholarship, as a result, have been broadly informed by education, musicology (early music and American music), and art and culture, represented by an extensive and diverse record of journal publications and conference lecture/presentations. Davenport’s current research documents the lives of the Black Mountain College artists, educators, and students who went on to establish the Gate Hill Cooperative, 30 miles north of Manhattan. Davenport grew up in the community and spent the first 36 years of his life there. His research work, subsequently, gathers much of his wide-ranging interests into one sphere.
Patsy Lynch Wood and Vera B. Williams in Louisville, CO., 2009. Photo by Mark Davenport. Courtesy of Landkidzink Image Collection.
Davenport holds the Ph.D. and Masters degrees in Musicology from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was the recipient of the Gordon Getty Foundation Scholarship and Ogilvy Research Fellowship (Center for British Studies) for his doctoral work on the seventeenth-century English composer William Lawes. He conducted graduate research at the Bodleian and Christ Church Libraries in Oxford. His undergraduate work was at Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, New York, and the State University of New York, College at New Paltz, where he received a B.A. in Music History and Literature, summa cum laude. Prior to his current position at Regis University, Davenport taught at the State University of New York, College at New Paltz, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the Metropolitan State University of Denver.