ASHEVILLE, NC.- The Asheville Art Museum presents a trio of exhibitions in 2006-07 entitled Black Mountain College: An Exhibition Series to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the college’s closing in 1956. Black Mountain College was one of the most unique experiments in American higher education and integral to our regional and national cultural heritage. The college was founded in 1933 fifteen miles east of Asheville as an experiment in diverse and unorthodox education, following some of the progressive principles espoused by John Dewey and others who were transforming higher education at a new generation of small U.S. colleges. In the early 1930s, America was in the depths of the Great Depression, European artists and intellectuals, fleeing oppressive regimes, were beginning to seek refuge in the United States and this country’s own artists were struggling free of provincialism and seeking to create art that was inherently American. From this convergence of cultural nationalism, experimentation, idealism, and international turmoil Black Mountain College emerged as a generative force in 20th century American culture.

For the many artists who taught at and attended Black Mountain College from cities across America and from Europe, Black Mountain College’s setting in the Blue Ridge Mountains had a profound influence on their work. The college comprised 1,600 acres where vegetable gardening and raising animals were as integral to the environment as learning and art-making. This remote and picturesque setting provided these artists the necessary distance from their everyday distractions and commercial pressures to experiment and forge new directions.

Black Mountain College: Its Time and Place will present work by such notables as John Cage, Elaine de Kooning, Aaron Siskind, Robert Rauschenberg and others, all of whom became major figures of international art and culture. The exhibition demonstrates how Black Mountain College’s idyllic landscape, non-competitive atmosphere and emphasis on experimentation, material exploration, and interdisciplinary collaboration profoundly affected their practice.

The exhibition is sponsored by Asheville Savings Bank, the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council and the Seth Sprague Charitable and Educational Foundation. Black Mountain College: An Exhibition Series is organized by the Asheville Art Museum. Black Mountain College: Its Time and Place is the first of three exhibitions at the Asheville Art Museum and begins a year long community celebration which will include films, talks, performance programs and more developed in partnership with the University of North Carolina Asheville, Asheville Symphony Orchestra, Diana Wortham Theatre and projects developed by Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and other organizations.