"To Open Eyes": Black Mountain College Into the 21st Century

Friday 3rd - Saturday 4th June, 2011

Founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, Black Mountain College was not your garden variety college compared to other institutions of higher learning in the United States at the time. Indeed, Black Mountain was as much a vortex of avant-garde art performances, experimental lifestyles, political radicalism, macho theatrics, utopian architectural dreaming, and collective manual labor as it was a college of liberal arts. Black Mountain College was where people gathered “to open eyes” as Josef Albers, teacher at BMC, put it.

Following up the 75th anniversary of the founding of BMC, we seek to gather a small group of scholars, artists, philosophers, musicians, architects and others interested in Black Mountain College to explore the ways the legacy of Black Mountain College continues to resonate across contemporary postmodern culture. Papers are to cover a wide range of subjects, including Black Mountain's relationship to:

• The Bauhaus (Josef and Anni Albers)
• Painting (Dan Rice, Robert Motherwell, Elaine and Willem de Kooning)
• Music (John Cage)
• Dance (Merce Cunningham)
• Architecture (Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius)
• Poetry (Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov)
• Visiting Speakers (Albert Einstein, Thornton Wilder, Norbert Wiener)
• Publishing (*Black Mountain Review*)
• Pedagogy (John Andrew Rice, John Dewey, Theodor Dreier)

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted to Daniel Kane and Paul Betts, by Friday 15th April.

Notification will be made by Tuesday 3rd May.

3rd June - University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RH (keynote)

4th June - Landsdowne Hotel, Lansdowne Place, Brighton BN3 1HQ

via Keston Sutherland