Feature Articles


August Issue 2002

Events are Planned for Celebrating the Legacy of Black Mountain College

In the summer of 1952 amid the creative ferment of Black Mountain College in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, John Cage created an unscripted presentation incorporating music, dance, spoken word, visual art and projections. Later titled Theatre Piece No. 1, the event achieved renown as the very first multi-media "Happening". On the 50th anniversary of this historic event, the Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center and its collaborators are presenting Under the Influence: Celebrating the Legacy of Black Mountain College.

Revolutionizing the American arts and sciences in the first half of twentieth century, the influence of Black Mountain College faculty and alums such as Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, M.C. Richards, Alfred Kazin, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Motherwell, Charles Olson, Robert Rauschenberg, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, and many others continues to be felt to this day.

Festival programming will consist of performances, installations, workshops. poetry readings, film screenings, and roundtables showcasing contemporary artists, performers, and theorists whose ideas and work bear the distinctive influence of Black Mountain College. Festival participants and contributors include musicians Pauline Oliveros, Tony Conrad, Mark Hosler, and John Cobb, poets Patrick Herron, Michael Boughn and Lee Ann Brown, installation artists Yoko Ono and Jack Dangers, educators Sue Riley and Greg Ulmer, filmmaker Craig Baldwin, dancer Ray Eliot Schwartz and many others.

The festival will occur Sept. 19-22, 2002 at various venues in Asheville, Black Mountain and Cullowhee, NC, with related events throughout the month. For detailed and up to the minute information, see the festival website at (www.blackmountaincollege.org/festival/).

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