Museum from Home

October 13-16, 2021 | Virtual + In-person | Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and UNC Asheville – This four-day event will bring together acclaimed artists and scholars to explore the intersections of art, faith, and spirit. Public events will include performances, film screenings, community workshops, lectures, and more.

October 13 at 7:30PM | Live at BMCM+AC and Zoom | Presented as part of the Faith in Arts Institute. It is time to set aside old assumptions about the antagonism between art and religion and look again with fresh eyes. In this lecture, Aaron Rosen, a leading scholar on religion and contemporary art as well as a practicing curator and critic, explores some of the key ways in which artists today are reframing how we think about religion and spirituality and driving new approaches to ethical issues including climate care and racial justice.

October 14 at 2:30PM | Live at UNC Asheville Highsmith Student Union and Zoom | Presented as part of the Faith in Arts Institute. This presentation by Rachel Elizabeth Harding will explore thematic parallels in the work of painters John Biggers (1924-2001) and Daniel Minter (1961). Separated by more than a generation, and each with his own unique professional trajectory, these creative artists share Southern roots, diasporic visions, and sensibilities grounded in both the materiality and the mysticism of African American life.

October 14 at 4:00PM | Live at UNC Asheville and Zoom | Presented as part of the Faith in Arts Institute. The arts were considered forms of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist practice in ancient China, and mountain landscape played an important part in that practice. Hinton will outline Ch’an insight. Then, starting from that understanding, he will discuss how Ch’an shaped the arts in ancient China, and how it migrated to America in the twentieth century, where it shaped poetry and visual-art in fundamental ways, a process in which John Cage and Black Mountain played a major role.

October 15 at 1:30PM | UNCA + Zoom | Presented as part of the Faith in Arts Institute. Guggenheim Fellow and Bessie Award recipient Kimberly Bartosik will stream clips and discuss the process around the creation of I hunger for you, her choreographic work focusing on the need for faith and the collective desire for transformation. Following the screening and discussion, Dance Scholar/Choreographer Christopher Rasheem Macmillan joins Kimberly in a rich conversation around their shared passion for questioning, through artistic practice, embodied pathways towards faith within a critical and compassionate understanding of our contemporary moment.

October 14 at 7:30 PM | BMCM+AC (120 College Street) – Presented as part of the Faith in Arts Institute. Film screening and talk with Director Marie Cochran. “Testify, Beyond Place” pays homage to the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church as well as its relationship to Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC. The year the film was produced in 2021, marked the 85th anniversary of the church demolition and gravesite removal to make way for the expansion of the campus.