The Farm at Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
September 28, 2024 – March 15, 2025
Mary Parks Washington, Untitled (Black Mountain College Histcollage), circa 1995. Mixed media / watercolor and newsprint on paper. Collection of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Gift of the Artist.
Built on more than a decade’s worth of deep, original archival research, this exhibition will constitute a comprehensive new history of Black Mountain College. By focusing on the farm, the exhibition sidesteps the popular paradigm of approaching BMC through its famous faculty and students, and instead offers a new cast of characters, one that includes mostly students, women, and farmers. It spotlights the importance of collaboration, both on campus among students, faculty, and faculty families, and in the community with farmers and organizations in nearby cities and towns. Finally, the exhibition shows what happens when communal living is no longer communal, and offers the first ever detailed account of the fall of the college, a dramatic and often dangerous story.
Curated by David Silver and Bruce Johansen
ORDER NOW: The Farm at Black Mountain College by David Silver
A record of the rise and fall of the BMC farm that foregrounds the voices of a new cast of characters
Black Mountain College (BMC) was a wellspring of 20th-century creative unorthodoxy. From its founding in 1933 and over its celebrated 24-year history, the small liberal arts school in rural North Carolina attracted a remarkable number of famous and soon-to-be famous artists, writers and visionaries including Anni and Josef Albers, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ray Johnson, Charles Olson and M.C. Richards. The exploits of these BMC cultural luminaries have been recounted time and time again.
Through deep original research, The Farm at Black Mountain College follows renegade students, faculty and farmers as they establish a campus farm in the 1930s, build a better farm in the 1940s and watch it all collapse in the 1950s. We meet a new cast of BMC characters whose stories have seldom, if ever, been explored, and whose adventures in agriculture illuminate what exactly happened at BMC across the decades, from optimistic community building to its plunge into substance-addled scarcity. In these engrossing pages, we encounter the extraordinary folk whose endeavors on the land helped shape the Black Mountain College of myth and extraordinary reality.
The Farm at Black Mountain College is co-published by Atelier Éditions and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.
Kenelm Winslow, Untitled photograph of Black Mountain College work camp, 1936 – 38. Kenelm Winslow Fotofolio, collection of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Gift of Kenelm Winslow, Jr.
Kenelm Winslow, Untitled photograph of Black Mountain College work camp, 1936 – 38. Kenelm Winslow Fotofolio, collection of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Gift of Kenelm Winslow, Jr.
Kenelm Winslow, Untitled photograph of Black Mountain College work camp, 1936 – 38. Kenelm Winslow Fotofolio, collection of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Gift of Kenelm Winslow, Jr.
Presents: DEER FREAKS…and decoys
This installation, presented in BMCM+AC’s lower gallery, explores the hyper-natural forces of attraction and repulsion informing our interactions with the landscapes we inhabit. From fence rows to scare-crows, DEER FREAKS documents the creative ways people propagate, shape, lure, and protect in their environments.
Swannatopia is a group of experimental artists headquartered in Swannanoa, NC and residing throughout the Southeastern United States. Over the past decade, they have set out to blur the lines between “artist” and “participant”, to defamiliarize the familiar, to nurture an immersive, whimsical, thoughtful, experience of empowerment and offer a glimpse of what is possible. To this end, Swannatopia’s “Experimental Art Club” launched in 2021. An experiment in and of itself, the Experimental Art Club aims to facilitate the free exchange of knowledge, experience, tools and materials, while bringing the people together to “make stuff for fun!”. Today, the group’s multigenerational list of collaborators totals 50+. Swannatopia’s Experimental Art Club has presented numerous installations locally and regionally, including at BMCM+AC’s annual {Re}HAPPENING.
Related Programs
“How Do We Mark the Flood?” at Warren Wilson College
Saturday, November 23rd at the Warren Wilson College Farm and Garden
{701 Warren Wilson Rd, Swannanoa NC}
PERSPECTIVES: Chloe Moore of Southside Community Farm
December 4, 2024 | Virtual
BMCM+AC presents a virtual PERSPECTIVES Conversation with Chloe Moore, farm manager at Asheville’s own Southside Community Farm. Chloe will discuss the history of Southside Community Farm, the organization’s current work, and the importance of contemporary initiatives towards food justice.
PERSPECTIVES: David Silver on The Farm at Black Mountain College
December 18, 2024 | 120 College St
BMCM+AC will host David Silver, co-curator of The Farm at Black Mountain College, for a gallery walk-and-talk alongside a book launch / signing event. Join us for an in-depth look at the Farm story and a celebration of the exhibition. This event is free and open to all.
This exhibition is supported in part by North Carolina Humanities, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
