ReVIEWING Black Mountain College

International Conference

Co-hosted by BMCM+AC and UNC Asheville

at UNC Asheville’s Reuter Center

September 26 – 28, 2025

Thematic Focus: Performance at Black Mountain College

Images: Elizabeth Schmitt Jennerjahn Dancing at Black Mountain College. Photograph by W.P. (Pete) Jennerjahn, 1951. Collection of BMCM+AC, Gift of Yvette Torres. | Merce Cunningham Dancing (contact sheet). Photographs by Hazel Larsen Archer, 1952 – 1953. Collection of BMCM+AC, © The Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer.

The ReVIEWING Black Mountain College conference is a forum for scholars and artists to contribute original work on topics related to Black Mountain College and its place in cultural history.

The format is designed to be interdisciplinary, with sessions that will include panels, presentations, performances, and workshops. BMC itself was a uniquely interdisciplinary organization, generating output from its faculty and students that often involved the melding of the visual, performing, and literary arts. Each year, conference participation reflects this; past presentations have explored wide-ranging, fruitful intersections such as (to name just a few of the most recent examples) how Charles Olson’s “projectivist” poetics inspired works on the stage and screen; the influence of choreographer Merce Cunningham on Abstract Expressionist painters trained at BMC such as Pat Passlof and James Bishop; the photography of poet-publisher-artist Jonathan Williams; the path from BMC’s first Summer Institute in honor of Arnold Schoenberg, to the design and philosophy of contemporary summer arts programs today; a performance connecting Ruth Asawa’s sculpture to contemporary dance; and a workshop offering attendees the opportunity to weave on looms with found materials, as Anni Albers’ BMC students did.

The conference is hosted annually in the fall. ReVIEWING 15 will take place September 26 – 28th, 2025, presented in conjunction with BMCM+AC’s fall 2025 exhibition, Points in Space: Performance at Black Mountain College, organized by Jeff Arnal, curator, and Adolfo Alzuphar, curatorial assistant. Black Mountain College’s interdisciplinary and collaborative philosophy fostered groundbreaking time-based experiments across disciplines, significantly influencing performance, theater, film, music, dance, and visual art worldwide. The exhibition will feature visual and time-based artworks that echo BMC’s innovative spirit from 1933 to 1957 including historical and contemporary works, interactive installations, performances, and immersive experiences that bring the past into conversation with the present. 

Keynote Speaker: Debra McCall

Debra McCall is a dance historian, choreographer, Certified Movement Analyst, and performer best known for her reconstructions of Oskar Schlemmer’s 1920s Bauhaus Dances. Recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the NEH, she also received the Rome Prize in Design from the American Academy in Rome and a Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award for her documentation of medieval reliefs of sacred dancers at the Thillai Nataraja Temple in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu. McCall served on the graduate faculties of New York University and Pratt Institute where she was Mellon Lecturer. Her Bauhaus work has been presented in a variety of venues including Performa 09, Artissima 17 Torino, and Harvard University’s The Bauhaus and Harvard: 100 years.

Proposals on any theme related to Black Mountain College and its legacy are encouraged and will be considered, and, in the spirit of BMC, the conference challenges disciplinary boundaries, and invites contributions of all genres: performances, panels, multi-media proposals, and workshops are welcome.

Browse past conferences

Interested in sponsoring ReVIEWING and supporting BMCM+AC? Contact us at info@blackmountaincollege.org to learn more.