Full Transcript for Concerning Art: The Black Mountain College Experience

began with in 1933, he actually hired, we'll talk about him a little bit later, but they hired Joseph Alblers, forgive me if I'm pronouncing that wrong again. But uh he actually came directly from the Bauhaus. And there's a huge connection between uh his thought process uh 07:34 Bauhaus and then how he influenced the Blackmount College to begin with. So from 1933 to 1941, was originally at, the Blackmount College was originally at Blue Ridge Assembly, but then they proceeded to purchase Lake Eden and ended up moving in. Another bulletin actually mentioned, they ended up 07:58 the students ended up having to build the new campus themselves. They volunteered from three to nine hours of work each week to construct their new campus. And this was directed by a visiting professor of architecture. So there are actually images and uh pictures that has the students building, let's say, like practice rooms or other buildings. And it's like, I would not personally want to do that after nine hours of classes, but. 08:27 here we are. those photos at the state archives? Yes, I believe so. Oh, cool. they're actually in the Western, you can actually find them online at digital NCDCR.gov and they have a Black Mountain College section in that. gonna put a good collection there. Yes. Nice, nice, nice. think you'll be able to find that link also in the show notes of this episode. You will. So they moved in in 1941 to... 08:56 the originally they were in the Blue Bridge Assembly. They moved in 1941 in Lake Eden, ah but that's during World War Two. So how did the campus feel the effects of the wartime? Yeah. So there's actually a primary source that we can see, and it was from a bulletin, which you can find at the digital archives titled Education in a Time of Crisis, uh published in May of by Erwin Strauss during the college's first annual visitors week. 09:26 He quotes, knowledge and skills certainly are indispensable for self preservation, although it is not everything will always be an essential goal. Later on, he says, we need to cultivate them not in a snobbish manner of our daily life, but at its center. Theodore Dresser also notes in a 1942 document that community work, particularly there, there was a plead for community work. 09:55 and a reminder to put more focus into such work due to low enrollment because of the wartime efforts. There was also issues with student training and overall overburdening up staff because many of the men there were not going to the college. I can guess for such a student-run and focused school, it probably hit them really hard to have a lot of their population suddenly gone. Yeah. 10:21 I believe at the time there was only a handful of students that were there. As a reminder, there wasn't many, they were not a grant funded organization, so everything was given by volunteer work and also community work as mentioned before. So the next section I want to talk about is the arts. uh They were focused heavily on visual arts, performing arts, and literature arts. uh So as mentioned before, they chose 10:50 Joseph Albers, who was one of the professors again at Bauhaus. And he acted as the first art professor from 1933 to 1949. He immigrated with his wife, Ani, and his viewpoint could be seen once again in a bulletin titled Concerning Art Instruction, which was published in June of 1934. He quotes, 11:19 Life is more important than school, the student and the learning more important than the teacher and the teaching. More lasting than having heard and read is to have seen and experienced. He later says, therefore to us, the act of drawing is more important than the graphical product. A color correctly seen and understood more important than a mediocre still life. So again, this really 11:48 drives home the idea of art as an experience more than the finished product. Ironically, this also goes into the issues surrounding Black Mountain College too at this time, which is they were considered uh communist because of the sort of anti-capitalistic nature of more experience than actual product. Sure, and it's probably with all this focus on community. 12:15 Yes. That's another big thing for them. Pooling together resources. Right. You know, everyone contributing work. Right. Rejection of the mainstream. Yeah. are usually done. Yeah, I mean, this idea of a color correctly seen and understood and then, uh you know, that's the visual arts. And we're talking a little bit about this communism and rejection of kind of social norms and mainstream. 12:40 But what about, there's other things to this, right? They're building campuses and they're working on doing the Bauhaus thing with the metal work in the wood shop. What about things like performing arts, music? Yeah, there's a huge uh performing arts scene. In 1944, they uh actually started a summer institute of music and arts, particularly. uh 13:04 This often had a different vibe than during the school year due to the limited time, but it also focused more on creating a concert or show. uh Some even quoted it to be a sort of utopia because you could just create and you don't have to worry about uh getting uh financial or getting focused. uh Getting approval for everything and going through red tape. definitely. They actually had uh the first 13:34 black student to enroll in an all-white institution. This was 10 years before Brown v. Board decision. Oh, wow. And her name was Alma Stone Williams. uh Of course, I have to put as a note, was still uh sexism, racism, and homophobia. However, uh this was more on a personal basis rather than a systematic university base. That's fascinating that the, you know, 14:02 this idea of utopia and community and willingness to accept all sorts of people into the institution. I think that's really fascinating. Do you know, um did anything that Almost N' Williams did, is that available? Yeah, I believe it is available. I'm

not sure if it's available particularly in the digital collection, but I know you can look up uh her name. She is a 14:31 prevalent musician and singer, believe. uh Excellent. Thank you. Well, this is a very progressive, quote unquote, college. They still had the sort of classical Western canon. composers, they played and performed composers such as Mozart, Brahms, and Dvorak, which I, as a violinist myself, I've played many of these. 14:58 uh The idea of like Western canon still translates into this space. 15:05 There is one composer, however, that has made waves in the avant-garde scene, and his name is John Cage, as we kind of teased in the earlier bits. And he would be considered the opposite of what we know as Western art music. So again, avant-garde and postmodern aesthetics. He was a composer who was very influential in the later half of the 20th century. 15:31 He published his later work, is one of the works that we kind of hinted at again, which is 433, which bewildered many of his audiences because it was just four minutes and 33 seconds of silence that the composer had to perform. This performance was so unique because he acted instead of having the performer play. The performer ended up acting as a guide to understand the 16:00 what is music and how to interpret sound. So instead of thinking sound is coming from a piano, they actually incorporated it into the sound of the room or the sound of the drums or the drumming of, let's say, outside. People shifting in their seats. Yes. Or coughing. 16:24 Yes. Sounds suspiciously like the sound of silence, but that's a different song by a different band. So this is fascinating. when did he do 433? He did 433 in 1952, actually around the same time that he just left Black Mountain College. I believe he did it uh at another college. And the person who actually performed this, David Tudor, actually came. 16:53 also to Black Mountain College. there's a long history of connecting here. It's also really fascinating to me because this point of silence at the beginning, as you said at the beginning of this program, that somebody comes out, sits down, and turns on a timer, and that's four minutes and 33 seconds, so we have to figure out what's going on here. That happened in 1952, a long time ago. And I think if somebody did that now, it'd still be pretty avant-garde. 17:21 I think people would still wonder what is happening? Is this right? Am I in the wrong room? know, I checked their tickets, all sorts of things. And so I think that's, I think that the fact that this is all coming out of this college is amazing. But the murmuring, the murmuring would be the music. Yeah. One guy in the back, is this right? I don't hear anything. Yeah, just turn up your... Grows into outrage. How dare you steal my money. 17:49 That's right. But yeah, this is 70 years ago, pushing the envelope. It's amazing. And he's even pushing it, like today. This is still performed. You can actually, arguably even more so, because you can actually see the, on YouTube, you can just look up 433 and you can listen, or not listen. Yeah, that was, I had a question, like is this written down on a sheet of music? It is a sheet music, and all it has is a 43, uh 18:18 or like, I Just empty spaces, guess. I don't know where sheet music, sorry. Yeah, no, no, of course. It's just written in rests. And then you have the time, and you have the et cetera. And there was another thing that Cage was actually a part of. it was called, in also 1952, there was this thing called The Happening, which featured Cage, David Tudor, as mentioned before, and Mert Cunningham, a dancer. 18:47 This this happening, quote unquote. It was also titled theater piece number one or the Black Mountain piece. Cage also noted that unlike the theater in the round where action takes place only in the center, in the happening action occurs in the center, the aisles and around the audience. The script for the performance were assigned different time slots and determined by chance operations to different participants. So this was based off of uh Mary Emma Harris. 19:17 a Black Mountain preliminary thinking uh from that article. It's amazing. you mean to tell me that every performance is different? Yes. Because it's done by chance operations? So the way that they actually do it is uh they have four or five different 19:45 like areas that the audience can actually see all at once. So the audience is in the center, as mentioned before. And then perhaps you have in front of you theater production. And then you might have to the side of you, have someone painting. And then behind you, you might have a dance number. And then the left of you or the right of you, you have like a 20:13 Orchestra performance. So if you were to go on four different nights, you might get a different performance based on where you're sitting. Yes. Interesting. That is, that is, I mean, that has to be done well. Otherwise it's going to sound like a mess. And that's amazing. Maybe that's why it's called, what is it, Happening? 20:33 Yeah, you like go and you're just like what is happening? Very good. Yeah, it could be. I you could go and be like this place is happening. Yeah, yeah. That's like a everything frequently lingo that people were saying in the day. But I would be more of the what is happening. What is happening here? Yeah. Well, and I think it has to produce really skilled people, because if you're just mediocre at what you do. 20:59 You're gonna get washed out. It won't blend together. Well people want to try it again Yeah, you got to make sure you're collaborating well with your other performers. Yeah, it's definitely again. It's community-driven It's like you have to work with other people to make things happen and you cannot be in your own individual mindset It has to be together and it has to work together So that's one of the things that I believe

came out of this and the happenings actually uh I'll talk about this later, but they're still happening 21:29 Yeah, yeah But uh these have been happening. Sorry, can say that but these have been going on throughout the the uh nationally and internationally as well, but And it also the other thing is that you know, just a second ago we were talking about the 40s and in World War two and how like There were three people on the campus. You can't do this with a small amount of people. So what's going on on that side of things? Yeah, so there is a 21:59 of a push. uh They've always had financial issues, unfortunately, but there was a push and there was a lot more uh students that actually ended up coming. uh Some of them actually wrote pieces uh that you can actually see. I'll talk about this a little bit later, but there's a uh Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center that has all these different information and different literatures that you can go and look at. 22:28 online, you don't even have to go there. So uh would highly recommend if you are interested in this topic to uh look into it. Yeah, I love it. Love it. Yeah. And so the Summer Institute continued through the 50s, and this harbored tons of artists and creators. The last aspect is, which I'll touch on briefly, is the literature and poetry side of things. 22:54 In 1951, they actually published a Black Mountain review, which was a glimpse into the poetry and other literature endeavors. I am not particularly a poetry person, so I do not understand all the, I suppose, ins and outs of poetry, but it is very interesting. You can find it on JSTOR, I believe. 23:18 Definitely would, again, recommend diving into it a little bit. It only went for, I believe, one volume, but it's up there, it's free, would recommend. Nice. And that's just only a brief overview, and there's so much more that can be talked about, but I'll keep it at that. Yeah, and I mean, we talked about the archives only briefly. We talked about how we can find a couple of these things in our archival collection and other archival collections, and we'll have links, of course, in the show notes, but there's... 23:48 I at the beginning said that this is how art and archives intersect, so do want to explain that part? Of course, right after this commercial break. There's always something new to discover at the State Archives of North Carolina. Interested in the history of African American churches and graveyards? Check out the Elizabeth Penn photograph collection. Want to learn more about World War I through the eyes of two sisters who served in France? The May and Elizabeth Jones papers are for you! 24:17 But there's so much more! From government records, you can learn about recent environmental history and the records of the low-level radioactive waste authority. Or visit an exhibit from the past that catered to visitors with visual disabilities in the Museum of Art's Mary Duke Biddle

Gallery file. Discover the story of the largest cotton mill in northeast North Carolina with the Elizabeth City Cotton Mill Collection at the Otterbanks History Center. 24:42 Or go to the Western Regional Archives in Asheville to fall head over heels for the love letters in the Garden Family Papers. Everywhere you turn, there's more to find at the State Archives of North Carolina. Visit us in Raleigh, Manio, Asheville, or online to make your own discoveries today. We teased the connection between archives and arts a second ago, but I realized you never mentioned what happened to the college. We kind of left it in the 50s. 25:11 Yeah, so, well, it closed in 1957, only after 27 years, but it had an amazing legacy, mostly due to financial and the lack of enrollment as the years progressed. Need people to make a community. Especially with that community focus. uh But its legacy... 25:36 still holds true. So you have the Black Mountain uh College Museum and Art Center in Nashville and NC. uh They are a stronghold that includes a gallery, library, and research center, and they also have revolving exhibits. They also hold tours as well to see the Lake Eden campus, or what was the Lake Eden campus. uh mentioned earlier also, they have these happenings, but they're called re-happenings. 26:03 So, Cage's happenings were such a success that after years, the Center decided to host its first re-happening in 2009. uh Since then, every year, this event has happened for one day where culture of the past and today collide. uh And you can find, again, more information on the blackmountaincollege.org. The final legacy is 26:31 in the state archives and other archival materials located at the Western Regional Archives. Now, I wanted to pose a question to you all and the audience. What do you think the archives looks like or any archives? Even if though you guys are in the field, is there a stereotype or idea that pops up when you think of it? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of that. There's archives as gatekeepers. There's all kinds of stereotypes out there. 27:00 um that exist about what we do and the records we deal with. I just think that a lot of it is, as many stereotypes are, not actually true. Yeah, yeah. And I totally agree. One thing I found when uh talking to the lead archivist at the Western Regional Archives, Heather South, is that there is a lot more to archives than just 27:30 papers and documents. One example that she actually sent me was a photograph of a giant Trojan horse that the uh students at Black Mountain College actually created. And this is outside, this is over five, six, it might be like six feet tall. um And she only, uh she stood next to it and that's one of the. 27:57 things that you can go see at the Western Regional Archives. So it's a lot of things, artifacts outside of that. um And they also have at the Western Regional Archives four major collections. So I'll go through a list of them, but generally speaking, if you have interest in it, I would definitely go and see. um I believe Heather right now is on uh leave. Yeah, and actually I'll mention she's on leave and um 28:27 But she's usually working in Pair and the other archivist is there. Her name is Sarah Downing. Yeah, and I actually talked to Sarah Downing on She's helping me find some music that hopefully we can play eventually. So that's gonna be exciting but so Talking to the both of them there are currently four major series in the Black Mountain College collection 28:54 This includes transcripts, faculty student publications, and administration records. The second is the NC State Project, which was created in 1970s, which included exhibits, file research, interviews with alumni, snapshots and photographs, reference files on topics from the visual arts, which was more in the 1972 area. The third is the Black Mountain College 29:23 Project, or the BMC Project, uh which is, as uh South mentioned, uh collection of collections. So there was a graduate assistant who worked on researching for the state-funded history, which I mentioned earlier, but her name is Mary Emma Harris. She ended up getting so much information and accounts and other resources that she ended up publishing a book, The Arts, at Black Mountain College in 1987. 29:53 And it's available to read on the Internet archives. So if you want to learn all that she has, read that book. And I took a lot of this also from that book as well. So I would recommend it. And finally, there are just manuscripts from individuals. So example is Ted and Andrew Bryce. And this includes 80 boxes of manuscripts. And also lots on funding. 30:23 and financials. So you can see all that nitty gritty history. All the bulletins that were referenced were pulled by Heather from various series as well as her extensive knowledge really helped frame this podcast. So shout out to her. Lovely. So we're getting through the history, the themes and now the archival connection. um But how does it all flow together? Yeah, it ties together because the ephemerality being 30:52 is being preserved, and I consider it, as many other archivists, as a living history. uh A few examples can be seen both after the closure of the school and today. We mentioned before music from John Cage and his trailblazing history of just scores and performance practices, uh including his happenings, were monumental to the modernist music uh scene. Visual arts from students. 31:22 Two of Adler's artists that he taught included Ruth Aswa and Robert Rukenscheinberg. Forgive me again with pronunciation. This also included larger techniques such as pottery, sculptures, architecture, photography, and a ton of other mixed media techniques. And there even non-arts. So there's an example by uh David Silver on the Black Mountain College's agriculture. 31:52 Some examples are the food sciences, so planting, growing, harvesting crops,

and including animal products, because they had farms there. So instead of working and studying inside of an archives that you guys might expect normal scholars or researchers to, there's an extra step of bringing the history outside of the room uh or the space that one might typically think. 32:20 A work of art needs to be visualized. Music needs to be heard or performed. There's different ways of engagement that can draw less so-called researchers that just focus on the documentation and what's the text on the page, but more of the creators. So for example, artists and musicians and writers to engage with these uh techniques or uh compositions or writings. 32:48 This is a really interesting topic to me, because not just the Black Mountain College, we have lot of collections at the State Archives that include sheet music, or uh maybe there's drawings or poetry that's just in collections. It's easier to showcase the visual arts element, because we can put them online, when people visit they can see them and view them, but for maybe those who can't read music ... 33:15 there's the extra element that's not being kind of showcased, the sound of it, the performance aspect. I think we have scripts at the State Archives, we have a folk art collection that has a lot of different material. So if you're not seeing it performed, you could consider an element as being lost in the interpretation of that. 33:38 I think the recipes are also interesting. I was gonna say the recipes. Go ahead, but keep going. Because we have a lot of recipes in our collection, in private manuscripts, some that we've put together that we're actually trying as archivists. We're doing a project right now to maybe put together a book of recipes that might materialize one day, once we try out a bunch and see what works. But yeah, it's a really interesting topic for me. Yeah, I I totally agree. Because you read, especially on the recipes, just because we can reference 34:08 and plug a previous episode for listeners. you read a recipe or you read sheet music and it doesn't come off the page. You have to do something to make it come off the page, unlike somebody writing a letter to somebody. It's different than that. And so you get these performances together. I put together, uh unsuccessfully some might say, a recipe from... 34:37 archives and it made the history present. Right. We had a Twitter series where we were having um different people from the archives make different recipes and just post about it. don't know where. Oh yeah the taste test. Yeah where that went. The ginger cake was very interesting to me. remember that one. uh I just remember that there were some weird ones where you're like why would they put these ingredients together. Yeah I think that's bringing up like. 35:07 another conversation, because some of these are from 70 years ago. The 1950s was when a lot of these were composed. And there's some context maybe that's been missing all this time. When you put it together in the future, you're like, well, I wasn't there. How did they experience it? Right. Yeah, and that's, mean, you can read two ingredients and say, oh, those probably shouldn't go together, but then move on. But if you're actually putting it together, you're like, wow, why did these two? And asking that question is what archivists want. 35:36 to do, right? That's what we as researchers, as people who look in the past try to bring it up front, we look and ask questions. And in doing that, we understand what's coming up. Yeah, and there's always different things that scholars or quote unquote scholars, because I am very into the non-traditional side of scholarship, I suppose, uh that we want to engage with all these different types. Because we talk to so many different kinds of people. And we talk. 36:05 no one person has the same uh outlook on the same thing. uh It's something that I really am passionate, I suppose, about is that just talk to people, collaborate, get people, uh bring this history, I guess, to life and not thinking of it in a stagnant sense because it is living. uh These are people from the past. For example, uh much like the 36:32 the relationship between recipes and music. uh You would never think that music would be a recipe, right? Like there's no food and music, what is the same similarities? But the similarities is that uh it's you. It's you as a person and it's you as someone who is making it uh now and in the present. adding a bit of your own self into this, so. 37:01 That's my plug and pitch for the future. Making that connection, think, the face-to-face, the talking with people, think that bringing that history to life, what was it like being on a battlefield? Just in a different context. Right, definitely different Reframing the documents that we have in a new way. It's almost like we're connecting the docks. Ah! Name drop end. 37:26 Close out the episode, we're done. yeah, making that connection, think, for us, working in an archive, we tend to really just see the documents more often than Arlie's. do. know John probably gets those connections more because he works in oral history, so he's having these I don't see any documents, I see people. I see the documents, me and Katie do. But it can get a little bit, you take yourself out of it a little bit, but once you... 37:56 take that and make a connection or meet someone who was related to this person and has these stories about them, it starts to really bring it to life and you start to see the sparkle and the magic of preserving the history and why people cared and why people did the things that they did. It adds a whole other element of why history is so important. Yeah, and there's a sort of passion that you 38:24 uh received that maybe you yourself might not feel initially, uh but that it's like contagious almost. uh I just wanted to note that Heather South actually noted the collections were originally housed in Raleigh, however they were moved back to its origin point in Black Mountain, which made it more accessible, affordable, et cetera, and more bang for, I guess, buck, in a sense. uh 38:50 because they were able to visit the land and the space and understand the space at the same time. look into your local museums, look into your local libraries, look into your local state archives. You never know what's going to be there. And this is a pitch for also all students who are interested in doing projects. Reach out, reach out and make those connections because we're. 39:14 ready, we are here for you. Yeah, and that's, mean, I made a flip comment about connecting the docs earlier, but it's not just, it's connecting the docs with other documents, but it's also connecting the docs with people. And connecting people back to the docs and connecting all of us together. And that way, the more we have that, I mean, it kind of goes back to the community aspect from earlier. The more we have that, the more community we have, the more we can understand about each other. And I think the better off we'll all be. Yeah. 39:44 I think that is a great place to end. Thank you so much, Olivia, for all the research and for sitting down and chatting with us. And thank you all for joining me today. And thank you for listening to this episode of Connecting the Docs. Stay tuned for more stories from the State Archives of North Carolina. I'd like to give special thanks to my guests, Olivia Coyne, Shauna Carr, and Katie Crickmore. The rest of our producers, Annabeth Poe, Josh Hager, Danielle Sherilla, and our FOA intern, Kaylin Preslar. 40:12 and of course to the voice you hear at the beginning and end of each episode, Judy Allen Dodson. I'm your host, John Horan. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Connecting the Docs. Don't forget to like, rate, and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you'll never miss an episode. If you like this show, you might want to check out our blog, History for All the People.