Too Cool, Even for this School
by Jess McCuan
The most famous woman associated with Black Mountain College, according to the museum’s program director Alice Sebrell, is probably Anni Albers, a German-born textile artist who died in 1994, but was one of the most renowned weavers of her day. Her solo show of “pictorial weavings” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1949 was the first solo show ever by a textile artist at the museum. Anni and her husband, artist and theorist Josef Albers, taught at the college for 16 years.
Another of Black Mountain’s notable female faculty was M.C. Richards, a poet and potter whose 1962 book Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person became required reading for people working with clay in the 1970s and ‘80s. Among the female students at Black Mountain College, the most significant, says Sebrell, was Alma Stone Williams, BMC’s first African-American student. Williams, a musician, enrolled during the summer of 1944, making Black Mountain College one of the first colleges in the South to integrate. Williams, who now lives in Savannah, will speak with four other BMC alumnae at a panel discussion October 4 at the UNCA Humanities Lecture Hall. Other events include a reading of works by BMC women and a lecture on modern art by BMC alumna Suzi Gablik.
The Women of Black Mountain College
This first of three exhibitions kicks off a year-long project focused on the women of BMC. It opens October 3 and runs through February 14, 2009. Visit blackmountaincollege.org for details.
Though you may not have heard of them, the women of Black Mountain College were just as radical as the men. The college, which operated in Black Mountain from 1933 to 1957, enrolled fewer than 1,500 students. But many of those students—like Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg—became influential figures in American arts and culture for decades afterwards, especially in avant-garde music, painting and poetry. Still, the female faculty and students at Black Mountain are altogether less well known than the men, and a new series of exhibits, coordinated by the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center in downtown Asheville, will explore what it was like to be a woman at the school.
The most famous woman associated with Black Mountain College, according to the museum’s program director Alice Sebrell, is probably Anni Albers, a German-born textile artist who died in 1994, but was one of the most renowned weavers of her day. Her solo show of “pictorial weavings” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1949 was the first solo show ever by a textile artist at the museum. Anni and her husband, artist and theorist Josef Albers, taught at the college for 16 years.
Another of Black Mountain’s notable female faculty was M.C. Richards, a poet and potter whose 1962 book Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person became required reading for people working with clay in the 1970s and ‘80s. Among the female students at Black Mountain College, the most significant, says Sebrell, was Alma Stone Williams, BMC’s first African-American student. Williams, a musician, enrolled during the summer of 1944, making Black Mountain College one of the first colleges in the South to integrate. Williams, who now lives in Savannah, will speak with four other BMC alumnae at a panel discussion October 4 at the UNCA Humanities Lecture Hall. Other events include a reading of works by BMC women and a lecture on modern art by BMC alumna Suzi Gablik.
The Women of Black Mountain College
This first of three exhibitions kicks off a year-long project focused on the women of BMC. It opens October 3 and runs through February 14, 2009. Visit blackmountaincollege.org for details.
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