Details

ONSITE & FIELD | Saturday, September 23, 9:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Instructor: Julie Thomson

$115 Non-member Adult**

(**Arboretum Members receive a 10% discount on all classes.)

Course Capacity: 15

A History of Black Mountain College will offer an introduction to one of the greatest experiments in U.S. education. Founded in 1933 Black Mountain College started at the Blue Ridge Assembly before moving to its permanent home at Lake Eden in 1941. This liberal arts college put the arts at the center of education. Notable faculty included Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Buckminster Fuller, Jacob Lawrence, Willem de Kooning, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. Students who attended Black Mountain College include Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, Ray Johnson, Hazel Larsen Archer, Kenneth Noland, and Jonathan Williams. We will watch and discuss the documentary Fully Awake. This will be accompanied by a Walking Tour of the Lake Eden Campus and the opportunity to view the current exhibition "Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students" on view this fall at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. If you've always wanted to learn more about Black Mountain College, its students, faculty, and its impact, this is the course for you.

Image Credit: Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, The Studies Building at Black Mountain College, 1949.

Collection of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Gift of Harriet Sohmers Zwerling.

Julie J. Thomson is an Environmental Educator, Naturalist, Independent Scholar, Curator + Artist who lives in Western North Carolina. She studies and shares the natural and cultural history of places, and teaches seeing. Julie also researches and writes about artists at Black Mountain College. In 2016 she curated Begin to See: The Photographers of Black Mountain College. She also edited That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson (Soberscove Press 2018). Currently she is co-curating Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students, which will open at Asheville’s Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Fall 2023. Instagram: @ncnaturalistjulie, juliejthomson.blogspot.com

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