The Farm at Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
September 28, 2024 – January 11, 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.
The opening reception and a keynote lecture will take place in conjunction with BMCM+AC’s annual ReVIEWING conference hosted at UNC Asheville. Exhibition themes will correspond to the chapters of co-curator David Silver’s book on this topic, to be published in conjunction with the exhibition in partnership with Atelier Editions.
Curated by David Silver and Bruce Johansen
PRE-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. Please note that this is a pre-order listing. Orders are expected to ship mid-October, 2024.
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
ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 15
October 25-27, 2024
The ReVIEWING BMC International Conference is held annually, co-hosted by BMCM+AC and UNC Asheville at UNCA’s Reuter Center. This year’s conference will take the thematic focus Living with the Land and will feature a keynote lecture by David Silver, co-curator of The Farm at Black Mountain College.
Ambient Farm Stroll with Swannatopia
Saturday, November 9th at the Warren Wilson College Farm and Garden {701 Warren Wilson Rd, Swannanoa NC}
This exhibition is supported in part by North Carolina Humanities, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
