Black Mountain College

 

Cy Twombly

Founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and other former faculty members of Rollins College, Black Mountain was experimental by nature and committed to an interdisciplinary approach, attracting a faculty that included many of America's leading visual artists, composers, poets, and designers, like Buckminster Fuller, who invented the geodesic dome.

  
 Josef Albers



Not a haphazardly conceived venture, Black Mountain College was a consciously directed liberal arts school that grew out of the progressive education movement. In its day it was a unique educational experiment for the artists and writers who conducted it, and as such an important incubator for the American avant garde.

 Josef Albers



Black Mountain proved to be an important precursor to and prototype for many of the alternative colleges of today ranging from Naropa University, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Marlboro College to Evergreen State College, Bennington College, Hampshire College, Shimer College, Prescott College, Goddard College, World College West (1973-1992), and New College of Florida, among others, including Warren Wilson College located just minutes down the road from where Black Mountain College was located.

For the first eight years, the college rented the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly buildings south of Black Mountain, North Carolina. In 1941, it moved across the valley to its own campus at Lake Eden where it remained until its closing in 1956. The property was later purchased and converted to an ecumenical Christian boys' residential summer camp (Camp Rockmont), which later became a long-time location of the Black Mountain Festival and the Lake Eden Arts Festival. A number of the original structures are still in use as lodgings or administrative facilities.

— Wikipedia








 

 
Cy Twombly

 

The founders of the College believed that the study and practice of art were indispensable aspects of a student's general liberal arts education, and they hired Josef Albers to be the first art teacher. Speaking not a word of English, he and his wife Anni left the turmoil in Hitler's Germany and crossed the Atlantic Ocean by boat to teach art at this small, rebellious college in the mountains of North Carolina.

 Cy Twombly

John Cage 




 Legendary even in its own time, Black Mountain College attracted and created maverick spirits, some of whom went on to become well-known and extremely influential individuals in the latter half of the 20th century. A partial list includes people such as Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Josef and Anni Albers, Jacob Lawrence, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Cy Twombly, Kenneth Noland, Ben Shahn, Franz Kline, Arthur Penn, Buckminster Fuller, M.C. Richards, Francine du Plessix Gray, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Dorothea Rockburne and many others, famous and not-so-famous, who have impacted the world in a significant way. Even now, decades after its closing in 1957, the powerful influence of Black Mountain College continues to reverberate.

www.blackmountaincollege.org

 Josef Albers



 For a short time in the middle of the twentieth century a small town in North Carolina became a hub of American cultural production. The town was Black Mountain and the reason was Black Mountain College. Founded in 1933, the school was a reaction to the more traditional schools of the time.

 Josef Albers




At its core was the assumption that a strong liberal and fine arts education must happen simultaneously inside and outside the classroom. Combining communal living with an informal class structure, Black Mountain created an environment conducive to the interdisciplinary work that was to revolutionize the arts and sciences of its time.

 Merce Cunninigham

 Merce Cunninigham




 Among Black Mountain's first professors were the artists Josef and Anni Albers, who had fled Nazi Germany after the closing of the Bauhaus. It was their progressive work in painting and textiles that first attracted students from around the country. Once there, however, students and faculty alike realized that Black Mountain College was one of the few schools sincerely dedicated to educational and artistic experimentation. 

Josef Albers 



By the forties, Black Mountain's faculty included some of the greatest artists and thinkers of its time: Walter Gropius, Jacob Lawrence, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, John Cage, Alfred Kazin, Merce Cunningham, and Paul Goodman. Students found themselves at the locus of such wide ranging innovations as Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome, Charles Olson's Projective Verse, and some of the first performance art in the U.S.

www.pbs.org

SECA 2013

The work of four Bay Area artists will appear in unexpected places from September 14 through November 17, 2013, as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents site-responsive projects by the 2012 winners of its signature SECA Art Award: Zarouhie Abdalian, Josh Faught, Jonn Herschend, and David Wilson.  

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Images courtesy of the artists and SFMOMA ^ 

David Wilson, Searching Notes (preparatory drawings related to Arrivals), 2013; ink on folded paper; dimensions variable; commissioned by SFMOMA; © David Wilson; photo: courtesy the artist.


DAVID WILSON

Oakland based artist David Wilson engages with experience of place through
a meditative drawing practice and through the orchestration of site-specific gatherings. The events that he organizes as 'Ribbons' grow out of long periods of space discovery and plein air study, and draw together a wide net of artists, performers, filmmakers, chefs, and artisans, into situation based collaborative relationships. He was recently awarded SFMOMA's 2012 SECA Award, was included in the 2010 CA Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, and had a 2010 MATRIX exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Southern Exposure recently awarded him an Alternative Exposure grant to support his work dreaming up spirited ways to bring people together.

— davidwilsonandribbons.com

Zarouhie Abdalian, Occasional Music (preparatory photograph showing space between buildings in downtown Oakland), 2013; public installation in downtown Oakland: brass bells and electronics; dimensions variable; commissioned by SFMOMA, courtesy the artist and Altman Siegel San Francisco; © Zarouhie Abdalian; photo: courtesy the artist.

ZAROUHIE ABDALIAN 


Abdalian received her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2010 and since then has exhibited solo projects and participated in several group exhibitions, both in the Bay Area and abroad. She made a site-specific architectural work for the international exhibition Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), 2011 that also utilized the properties of sound. Modifying the architecture of the biennial building, she affixed transducers to the backs of the gallery’s drywall, causing the room to literally vibrate—a sensation that could be both heard and felt; a plumb bob hanging from the far wall rattled against the surface, rendering the vibrations of the wall visible. More recently, Abdalian was awarded SFMOMA’s 2012 SECA Art Award; as part of that exhibition, she will have a sonorous public artwork on view in downtown Oakland beginning in September.

— http://bampfa.berkeley.edu

Josh Faught, BE BOLD For What You Stand For, BE CAREFUL For What You Fall For (detail), 2013; site-specific installation; hand-dyed and hand-woven texile; commissioned by SFMOMA, courtesy the artist and Lisa Cooley, New York; © Josh Faught; photo: Ben Blackwell

 

JOSH FAUGHT
 
Josh Faught lives and works in San Francisco. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Lisa Cooley, New York (2012, 2010); Western Bridge, Seattle (2010); and the Seattle Art Museum (2009). His work has been featured in group exhibitions at University Art Museum, Albany (2012); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2011); Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft (2009); and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2007), amongst others. Faught is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2011) and the Betty Bowen Award, Seattle Art Museum (2009). He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an Assistant Professor at the California College of Arts. 

— http://www.camstl.org

Stories from the Evacuation (still), 2013; HD video, color, sound; commissioned by SFMOMA, courtesy the artist and Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco; © John Herschend

JONN HERSCHEND

Raised in a midwestern amusement park, Jonn Herschend is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and experimental publisher whose work explores fiction, reality and the narrative structures that we employ as a way to explain the chaos and clutter of our everyday lives.  His videos, performances, installations, and photos all incorporate sterile and formally recognizable structures such as PowerPoint presentations, academic lectures, photographic evidence, infomercials, gallery exhibitions, or educational videos.  He uses these structures as a means to investigate the issues of truth and confusion, and allows the messiness of reality to eventually collapse the whole piece.

His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including Den Frie Contemporary Art Center in Copenhagen, Denmark; Diverse Works, Houston Texas; the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Southern Exposure and The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; the San Francisco International Film Festival, and a current commission for SITE Santa Fe and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.  He is the co-founder and co-editor, along with Will Rogan, of the experimental publication THE THING Quarterly, and is a recent recipient of a Danish Arts Council grant for his work as co-curator, along with Heidi Hove, of the Deadpan Exchange international exhibition series.  He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California Berkeley, San Francisco State University, California College of Art and Stanford University.
 

 — jonnherschend.com

 
 

 

^ SFMOMA is committed to protecting the copyrights and other intellectual property rights of creative artists and other owners of intellectual property rights. SFMOMA grants permission to use image(s) only to the extent of its ownership rights relating to those image(s). Certain works of art, as well as photographs of those works of art, may be protected by copyright, trademark, or related interests not owned by SFMOMA. The responsibility for ascertaining whether any such rights exist and for obtaining all other necessary permissions remains solely with the party reproducing the image(s). SFMOMA reserves the right to request copies of such permissions. In addition, image(s) must be reproduced with notice of attribution, and the party reproducing the image(s) may not crop, distort, mutilate, or otherwise modify the image(s) in any manner that would prejudice the artwork or the artist’s honor and reputation.

Jack Hirschman

Jack Hirschman is an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry and essays.  

— Wikipedia

Born in New York City, Hirschman received a Bachelor of Arts from City College of New York in 1955, and an A.M. and Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1957 and 1961, respectively. While attending City College, he worked as a copy boy for the Associated Press. When he was 19, he sent a story to Ernest Hemingway, who responded: "I can't help you, kid. You write better than I did when I was 19. But the hell of it is, you write like me. That is no sin. But you won't get anywhere with it." Hirschman left a copy of the letter with the Associated Press, and when Hemingway killed himself in 1961, the "Letter to a Young Writer" was distributed by the wire service and published all over the world.





 

His first volume of poetry, published in 1960, included an introduction by Karl Shapiro: "What a relief to find a poet who is not afraid of the vulgar or the sentimental, who can burst out laughing or cry his head off in poetry -- who can make love to language, or kick it in the pants."

For a quarter century, Hirschman has roamed San Francisco streets, cafes (including Caffe Trieste, where he has been a regular patron), and readings, becoming an active street poet and a peripatetic activist. Hirschman is also a painter and collagist, and has translated over two dozen books from German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Albanian, and Greek.

 

Hirschman earned degrees from City College of New York and Indiana University, where he studied comparative literature. He was a popular and innovative professor at UCLA in the 1970s, before he was fired for his anti-war activities. Hirschman has lived in California ever since, making an artistic and political home in the North Beach district of San Francisco. He is known for his radical engagement with both poetry and politics: he is a member of the Union of Street Poets, a group that distributes leaflets of poems to people on the streets. He has also been instrumental in the formation of the Union of Left Writers of San Francisco. 










 

 


In keeping with his political values, Hirschman’s books are published with small, independent presses, often in small runs. According to the poet David Meltzer, Hirschman is “a great teacher who refuses to work in the university, a scholar of great merit who refuses to publish in the mainstream presses; most everything is published by himself, 150 copies.” 

Though Hirschman has rejected mainstream success, he has published prolifically. His 50-plus volumes of poetry include A Correspondence of Americans (1960), Lyripol (1976), Front Lines: Selected Poems (2002), and All That’s Left (2008). His 1,000-page masterpiece, The Arcanes, was published in 2006. The work, written over decades, was heralded by Alan Kaufman in the San Francisco Gate as “unlikely and historically significant a literary production as, say, the appearance of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or James Joyce’s Ulysses… like Whitman’s and Joyce’s masterpieces, it traces the progress of an individual consciousness through landscapes teeming with the horrible glory of modern life.”

 

The former poet laureate of San Francisco, Hirschman’s style has been compared to poets ranging from Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, and Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg. His poems’ commitment to leftist politics draws comparisons to Vachel Lindsay and Pablo Neruda. A communist since 1980, Hirschman told Contemporary Authors: “It is vitally important at this time that all poets and artists collectivize and form strong socialist cadres in relation to working-class cultural internationalism.” 

 Hirschman married Ruth Epstein, whom he'd met and dated when they were students at CCNY, in 1954. Following graduation, Ruth became a program director for National Public Radio and eventually general manager of Santa Monica public radio station KCRW. The couple had two children. In the 1950s and 60s, Jack Hirschman taught at Dartmouth College and University of California, Los Angeles. During his tenure as professor at UCLA one of the students enrolled in his class was Jim Morrison, later to be a cofounder and lead vocalist of the American band The Doors. The Vietnam War, however, put an end to Hirschman's academic career; he was fired from UCLA after encouraging his students to resist the draft.

Hirschman has been hailed as “one of the left’s most prolific and consistent poetic voices,” by Contemporary Poets. But while he is known throughout San Francisco, his real literary fame has blossomed in Europe, where he frequently publishes both his original work and volumes of translation. Meltzer noted that in France “they consider him a major Communist poet.” Part of Hirschman’s dedication to politics and poetry can be traced to his numerous translations of radical poets from around the world. The many languages he has translated include Russian, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Albanian, Yiddish, Vietnamese, and Creole. 

 

In interviews, Hirschman has acknowledged his political involvement began by reading Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as through his contact and friendship with the Beats. As he told Marco Nieli in Left Curve, “Mayakovsky, the first street poet of the century, caught my attention, also because of his relation to the Bolshevik Revolution and because Ginsberg’s Howl had evoked something of Mayakovsky’s journalistic notation. 

So, before I had learned Russian (which was to come 18 years later) I had Victor Erlich, a friend at the time in Indiana, give me the translations of the texts and I wrote Mayakovsky into American in free verse form. And it was that translation (though I’d written a short praise poem to Allen after Howl’s publication) that actually began my friendship with Ginsberg, when I brought the text to New York in the late ‘50s.”   

Since then, Hirschman has continued to translate unabated. He both co-edited and co-translated the collection Open Gate: An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry (2002). Kai Maristed remarked in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that “With Open Gate in hand, one is tempted to say that news of the death of responsible American publishing may be premature.”   

 — www.poetryfoundation.org

Francesca Woodman

American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring herself and female models. Many of her photographs show young women who are nude, blurred (due to movement and long exposure times), merging with their surroundings, or whose faces are obscured. Her work continues to be the subject of much critical acclaim and attention, years after she committed suicide at the age of 22.

Francesca Woodman was born on April 3, 1958, in Denver, Colorado, to well-known artists George Woodman and Betty Woodman (Abrahams). Her older brother Charles later became an associate professor of electronic art. Her mother is Jewish and her father is from a Protestant background.

Woodman attended public school in Boulder, Colorado, between 1963 and 1971 except for second grade, which she attended in Italy. She began high school in 1972 at the private Massachusetts boarding school Abbot Academy, where she began to develop her photographic skills and became interested in the art form. Abbot Academy merged with Phillips Academy in 1973; Woodman graduated from the public Boulder High School in 1975. Through 1975, she spent summers with her family in Italy. She spent her time in Italy in the Florentine countryside, where she lived on an old farm with her parents.

_______________________

Beginning in 1975, Woodman attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island. She studied in Rome between 1977 and 1978 in a RISD honors program. As she spoke fluent Italian, she was able to befriend Italian intellectuals and artists. She went back to Rhode Island in late 1978 to graduate from RISD.

Woodman moved to New York City in 1979. After spending the summer of 1979 in Stanwood, Seattle whilst visiting her boyfriend at Pilchuck Glass School, she returned to New York "to make a career in photography." She sent portfolios of her work to fashion photographers, but "her solicitations did not lead anywhere. In the summer of 1980 she was an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

In late 1980 Woodman became depressed due to the failure of her work to attract attention and to a broken relationship. She survived a suicide attempt, after which she lived with her parents in Manhattan. On January 19, 1981, she committed suicide by jumping out a loft window in New York. An acquaintance wrote, "things had been bad, there had been therapy, things had gotten better, guard had been let down. Her father has suggested that Woodman's suicide was related to an unsuccessful application for funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

— Wikipedia

Francesca Woodman: notes sur tirages photographique

 

 

 

Francesca Woodman (USA, 3 avril 1958 – 19 janvier 1981) était une photographe connue pour ses photos noir et blanc mettant en scène elle-même et des modèles féminins. Beaucoup de ses photographies montrent des jeunes femmes nues, floues (à cause du mouvement et de longs temps d'exposition), qui fusionnent avec leur environnement, ou dont les faces sont masqués. Son travail continue d'être l'objet de beaucoup d'attention, des années après que qu'elle se soit suicidée à l'âge de 22 ans.

 Images from www.stephanebouillet.com

Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden was an African-American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, collage. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden moved to New York City at a very young age and went on to graduate from NYU in 1935.

— Wikipedia

Romare Howard Bearden was born on September 2, 1911, to (Richard) Howard and Bessye Bearden in Charlotte, North Carolina, and died in New York City on March 12, 1988, at the age of 76. His life and art are marked by exceptional talent, encompassing a broad range of intellectual and scholarly interests, including music, performing arts, history, literature and world art. Bearden was also a celebrated humanist, as demonstrated by his lifelong support of young, emerging artists.

Romare Bearden began college at Lincoln University, transferred to Boston University and completed his studies at New York University (NYU), graduating with a degree in education. While at NYU, Bearden took extensive courses in art and was a lead cartoonist and then art editor for the monthly journal The Medley. He had also been art director of Beanpot, the student humor magazine of Boston University. Bearden published many journal covers during his university years and the first of numerous texts he would write on social and artistic issues. He also attended the Art Students League in New York and later, the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1935, Bearden became a weekly editorial cartoonist for the Baltimore Afro-American, which he continued doing until 1937.

After joining the Harlem Artists Guild, Bearden embarked on his lifelong study of art, gathering inspiration from Western masters ranging from Duccio, Giotto and de Hooch to Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse, as well as from African art (particularly sculpture, masks and textiles), Byzantine mosaics, Japanese prints and Chinese landscape paintings.

Bearden's work is included in many important public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. He has had retrospectives at the Mint Museum of Art (1980), the Detroit Institute of the Arts (1986), as well as numerous posthumous retrospectives, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (1991) and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2003).

In 1954, Bearden married Nanette Rohan, with whom he spent the rest of his life. In the early 1970s, he and Nanette established a second residence on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, his wife's ancestral home, and some of his later work reflected the island's lush landscapes. Among his many friends, Bearden had close associations with such distinguished artists, intellectuals and musicians as James Baldwin, Stuart Davis, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Joan Miró, George Grosz, Alvin Ailey and Jacob Lawrence. 

Bearden was also a respected writer and an eloquent spokesman on artistic and social issues of the day. Active in many arts organizations, in 1964 Bearden was appointed the first art director of the newly established Harlem Cultural Council, a prominent African-American advocacy group. He was involved in founding several important art venues, such as The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Cinque Gallery. Initially funded by the Ford Foundation, Bearden and the artists Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow established Cinque to support younger minority artists. Bearden was also one of the founding members of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters in 1970 and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972.

Recognized as one of the most creative and original visual artists of the twentieth century, Romare Bearden had a prolific and distinguished career. He experimented with many different mediums and artistic styles, but is best known for his richly textured collages, two of which appeared on the covers of Fortune and Time magazines, in 1968. An innovative artist with diverse interests, Bearden also designed costumes and sets for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and programs, sets and designs for Nanette Bearden's Contemporary Dance Theatre.










Among Bearden's numerous publications are: A History of African American Artists: From 1792 to the Present, which was coauthored with Harry Henderson and published posthumously in 1993; The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden (1983); Six Black Masters of American Art, coauthored with Harry Henderson (1972); The Painter's Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting, coauthored with Carl Holty (1969); and Li'l Dan, the Drummer Boy: A Civil War Story, a children's book published posthumously in September 2003.


 

Bearden was the recipient of many awards and honors throughout his lifetime. Honorary doctorates were given by Pratt Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Davidson College and Atlanta University, to name but a few. He received the Mayor's Award of Honor for Art and Culture in New York City in 1984 and the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Ronald Reagan, in 1987.

beardenfoundation.org