International Conference
September 26-28, 2014
Thematic Focus: The Writers of Black Mountain College
The 6th Annual ReVIEWING Black Mountain College conference will focus on the writers associated with Black Mountain College and their influence on the form and content of poetry, literature and non-fiction. From the groundbreaking ideas of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley in poetry, to the incisive and revealing non-fiction of Francine du Plessix Gray and Michael Rumaker, to the scholarly and thought-provoking work of Suzi Gablik and Charles Perrow, this thematic focus is rich with material. Presentations and performances are not limited to this theme and may address any topic related to Black Mountain College and its legacy. Hosted and sponsored by Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and the University of North Carolina Asheville.
In conjunction with the conference, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center will present the exhibition Dan Rice at Black Mountain College: Painter Among the Poets exploring the work of this important, but often overlooked, Abstract Expressionist painter and BMC alumnus.
Keynote Speaker: Vincent Katz
Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, critic, and curator. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, two books of translation, and his criticism has been published in numerous books, catalogues, and journals. He was awarded a Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature at the American Academy in Rome for 2001-2002 and has had residencies at the American Academy in Berlin and Yaddo. He was the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment In Art, published by MIT Press in 2002 and reprinted in 2013 and curated an exhibition on Black Mountain College for the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 2002. He is the author of The Complete Elegies Of Sextus Propertius (Princeton, 2004), which won the National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association, and Alcuni Telefonini, a collaboration with painter Francesco Clemente, published in 2008 by Granary Books. He teaches in the MFA Program in Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he has created a course entitled “Investigating Interdisciplinarity.” He has lectured extensively on poetry and visual art.
Featured Speaker: Mary Emma Harris
Black Mountain: Was It a Real College or Did We Just Make It Up Ourselves?
Independent scholar Mary Emma Harris is author of The Arts at Black Mountain College and Chair and Director of the Black Mountain College Project, which preserves and documents the history and influence of BMC’s unique educational experiment, Harris has studied the college for over thirty years, first learning of it as an Art History student at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Featured Speaker: William Craig Rice
Back in Print: The Suppressed Autobiography of Black Mountain Founder John Andrew Rice
William Craig Rice is the Director of the Division of Education Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Before coming to NEH in 2007, Bill served as the 12th president of Shimer College, a college dedicated to the study of the great books, and taught writing seminars for many years at Harvard. He is the author of Public Discourse and Academic Inquiry (1996) and of essays, poems, and reviews in The Common Review, The New Criterion, The Satirist, and other periodicals. He is the grandson of John Andrew Rice, the founder of Black Mountain College. Rice collaborated with Mark Bauerlein in editing the republication of John Andrew Rice’s suppressed autobiography, I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century (University of South Carolina Press, 2014).
