CA Conrad visits UNCA

Tomorrow. He'll be reading in the Glasshouse, in Ramsey Library, building #4 on the linked map, at 7:30, and says he's bringing advance copies of his new book, Advanced Elvis Course. He's a poet of real verve and spirit, and has a genuine ear for measure underneath it all. Definitely worth catching, even on a Wednesday night.

Re-Viewing the schedule

Always looking to save you a click! Here's the schedule for Re-Viewing Black Mountain College, underway at UNCA (and other locations, including the old Black Mountain College campus) for the next three days:



Re-Viewing Black Mountain College
Event Schedule - Revised 10/5/09
All presentations except the Friday night reception and the Sunday afternoon BMC tour will take place at UNC Asheville

Admission: $10 per day or $15 for the weekend
UNCA faculty, staff + students free
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9 1:00- 3:00 - REGISTRATION AND RECEPTION

FRIDAY SESSION ONE 2:00-3:15
LOCATION: Highsmith Room 224 Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center – 16 years old and growing

A Discussion on the Activity of BMC Museum + Arts Center

Session Chair: Brian Butler

Connie Bostic (BMCM + AC)

Alice Sebrell (BMCM + AC)

Helen Wykle (UNC-Asheville)

FRIDAY SESSION 2 3:30-4:45 LOCATION: Highsmith Room 224 Educational Legacy

Session Chair: Katie Lee

The Influence of Black Mountain College on Post-Studio Fine Art Programs
Jennifer Rissler (San Francisco Art Institute)
The Influence of Black Mountain College on the China Central Academy of Art Summer Studio Program: Studio, Process and the Context of Location
Stephen Lane (Columbia University and the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing)

A Comparison of BMC and the European Graduate School in Switzerland (Artists in Community)
Sally Atkins (Appalachian State University)



LOCATION: Highsmith Room 223 Women of BMC
Session Chair: Connie Bostic

Hazel Larsen Archer: “Nothing was ever the same again”
Ann Dunn (UNC-Asheville) The Women of Black Mountain College: Searching for Lost Recognition
Melanie Heindl

The Wives of Black Mountain College
Marianne Woods (University of Texas, Permian Basin)



LOCATION: Highsmith Room 221/222 Chance Operations I

Session Chair: Brenda Coates
How to Make an Artist: The Teaching of Josef Albers and Ray Johnson’s Work
Julie Thomson (Coordinator of Public Programs, Whitney Museum of American Art)
Hermeneutic Ontology and the Black Mountain Poets
Nick Boone (Harding University)
Black Mountain College - An Oxford Education?
Siu Challons Lipton (Queens University)

FRIDAY SESSION 3 6:30-9:00
LOCATION: Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center 56 Broadway Asheville, NC 28801

Reception at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

6:30 - 8:00 Performance
Motion Sculpture Movement Installation: Attack Of The Killer Stripey Tubes!!!
Claire Elizabeth Barratt (Cilla Vee Life Arts)
8:00 - 8:20 Reading
Readings from Black Mountain Days
Michael Rumaker, BMC alumnus

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10 SATURDAY SESSION ONE 9:00-10:15 LOCATION: Highsmith Room 224 Chance Operations II
Session Chair: Sebastian Matthews

Decoding Black Mountain
Kate Dempsey

From BMC to NYC: A Novice Curator’s Notes on Ray Johnson’s Early Years (and the Influence of Place on His Creative Process)
Sebastian Matthews (BMC Museum + Arts Center)
Teaching Creative Writing and Literature After Olson
Jonas Williams (SUNY, Albany)
LOCATION: Highsmith Room 223 Avant-Garde BMC
Session Chair: Andrea Liu

Lou Harrison: Stranger in a Strange Land
Seamus McNerney (UNC-Asheville)
Black Mountain College and the Paradox of the Avant-Garde
Willoughby Parker (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) Black Mountain College: America’s Last Avant-Garde?
Kenneth Surin (Duke)

LOCATION: Highsmith Room 221/222 Chance Operations III
BMC and Designing Higher Education in the Arts
Frank Hursh (BMC Alumnus, La Universidad de las Artes Mexico, A.C., Querétaro, Qro. MEXICO)
SATURDAY SESSION TWO 10:30-11:45

LOCATION: Highsmith Room 221/222 Queer BMC
Session Chair: Jennifer Sorkin

(Lake) Eden and its Serpents: Martin Duberman's Black Mountain and Queer Historiography and Pedagogy
Jason Ezell (Lincoln Memorial University)

Beyond the New York Intellectual: Jewish Refugees and Homosexuals at Black Mountain College, N.C.
Wendy Fergusson (Director, Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery)
"Like a Girl:" Gendered Sexual Difference at Black Mountain College and the Development of Postmodernism
Jonathan Katz (SUNY Buffalo)

LOCATION: Highsmith Room 224 Query and Pursuit in Artistic Practice and Erudition

Session Chair: Valerie George

Artist’s Panel

Jeremiah Barber (Artist, Chicago)

Terry Berlier (Artist, Stanford)

Erica Gangsei (Artist, San Francisco)

Christy Gast (Artist, Miami)

Valerie George (Artist, University of West Florida)
LOCATION: Highsmith Grotto Performance

Poet’s Panel/Lucipo Poetics Group

Session Chair: Sebastian Matthews

Jeff Davis (Poet, Scholar)

Joseph Donahue (Duke)

Thomas Meyer (The Jargon Society)

David Need (Duke)

Ted Pope (Poet)

LUNCH BREAK 11:45-1:15
SATURDAY SESSION THREE 1:15-2:30
LOCATION: Highsmith Room 221/222 Josef Albers

Session Chair: Kate Dempsey
Connecting the Dots: Color Theory and the Black Mountain College Legacy
Marcia R. Cohen (SCAD)
What Josef Albers Taught at Black Mountain College, and What Black Mountain College Taught Albers
Frederick A. Horowitz (Washtenaw College)
Aesthetic Pragmatism: Josef Albers’ Pedagogical Innovations at Black Mountain College
Mindy Tan (Purdue)
LOCATION: Highsmith Room 224 Black Mountain Poets

Session Chair: Nicholas Boone

Robert Creeley’s Buffalo
David Landrey (Buffalo State College)
Brian Lampkin (East Carolina University)
Charles Olson and the Ethics of Parataxis
Douglas Duhaime (University of Wisconsin)
LOCATION: Highsmith Grotto Performance/Demonstration
Awakening the Creative Imagination: How Art, Science, and Action Converge on Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map
Mark Hanf & Marnie Muller
SATURDAY SESSION FOUR 2:45-4:00

LOCATION: Highsmith Room 224 M.C. Richards

Session Chair: Mary Emma Harris

The Ruse of Medusa: Black Mountain College and the French Obsession
Louly Konz (Warren Wilson College)
A Woman Alone: Examining M.C. Richards’ Legacy
Jenni Sorkin (Yale)
Reflections on the Influence of M.C. Richards’ Pottery, Poetry and Philosophy on Contemporary Art and Craft Education
Courtney Lee Weida (Adelphi University)
LOCATION: Highsmith Room 221/222 BMC's Legacy
Session Chair: Grace Campbell

Aftereffects: Buckminster Fuller and the Legacy of Black Mountain College
Eva Diaz (Pratt Institute)
I’m…Nix That….WE'RE Starting a College
Richard Liston (Sphere College)
“Alone Together”: On Merce Cunningham and the Question of Black Mountain College’s Artistic Legacy
Kate Markoski (Johns Hopkins)
LOCATION: Highsmith Grotto John Cage
Session Chair: Natalie Farr

Embodying the Collective: Theatre Piece No. 1 and the Estheticization of Experience
Anastasia Rygle
Theatre Piece Number 2: The Unimpededness of Cage’s Theater Piece Number 1 and the Interpenetration of Black Mountain College
Philip Schuessler (Stony Brook) Composing by Chance: The Asian Factor in John Cage’s Aesthetics
Holly E. Martin (Appalachian State University)
SATURDAY SESSION FIVE 4:15-5:30
LOCATION: Highsmith Room 224 BMC and Interdisciplinarity

Session Chair: Stephen Lane
Rauschenberg, Kline and Wolpe: Letters to Jack Tworkov, Black Mountain College and Beyond
Jason Andrew (Archivist and Curator, Estate of Jack Tworkov)

Restraining Subjectivity at Black Mountain College: Charles Olson and Cy Twombly’s Ecology of writing and Painting
Joshua S. Hoeynck (Washington University, St. Louis)
Interdisciplinarity: Black Mountain College’s Anomaly
Andrea Liu (Critic, NY)

LOCATION: Highsmith Room 221/222 Form and Content

Session Chair: Cynthia Canejo
Max Dehn: An Artist among Mathematicians and a Mathematician among Artists
David Peifer (UNC-Asheville)
Black Mountain, Modernism and Progressive Form
Patrick McHenry (University of Florida)
Black Mountain College: Form as the Creator of Content
Mary Emma Harris (Scholar, NY)
LOCATION: Highsmith Grotto Performance
The Polygons: a Performance
Vincent Wrenn (Artist, Asheville)
5:30-6:45 LOCATION: Highsmith Pinnacle
Reception Pieces of Random Light, an Interactive Collage
Caprice Hamlin-Krout (Artist, Asheville)

SATURDAY 7:00
LOCATION: Highsmith Alumni Hall Welcome

Connie Bostic (Board Chair, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center)

Jane Fernandes (Provost, UNC-Asheville)
Keynote Address

Dorothea Rockburne:"All of Nature is Written in Numbers" -Max Dehn


SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11 SUNDAY SESSION ONE 9:00-10:15
LOCATION: Highsmith Room 224 John Dewey

Session Chair: Brian Butler

'Education by Association': Dewey on Black Mountain College
Michael Kelly (UNC-Charlotte)
The Prospect of an Ideal Liberal Arts College Curriculum: Reconstructing the Dewey-Hutchins Debate
Shane Ralston (Penn State University, Hazleton)
How was ‘creativity’ defined at Black Mountain College?
Seymour Simmons (Winthrop University)

LOCATION: Highsmith Room 221/222 Political BMC

Session Chair: Jason Andrew
Between Realism and Abstraction: Rethinking the Shahn/Motherwell Debate
Ken Betsalel (UNC-Asheville)
“Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement,” John Chamberlain’s “American Tableau, 1984”and the Reagan War Machine”
Thomas M. Murphy (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi)
Charles Olson’s Administrative Poetics: From the Office of War Information to Black Mountain College
Lisa Siraganian (Southern Methodist)
LOCATION: Owen TBA Workshop (From 9:00 to 12:00) Centering the Erotic Play of Paradox: Embodying the Legacy of M.C. Richards Through “Clay Color and Word”
Katherine McIver (Artist, Asheville)
SUNDAY SESSION TWO 10:30-11:45

LOCATION: Highsmith Room 221/222 Community

Session Chair: Louly Konz
The Role of the Black Mountain Review in Creating a Poetic Community
Rachel Stella (Critic, Paris)
Trains and Thinking: Evidence of a Collective Moment
Natalie M. Farr (College of Santa Fe)
Creating a Creative Community
Elizabeth Ross (Central Piedmont Community College)
LOCATION: Highsmith Room 224 Architecture and BMC
Session Chair: Douglas Duhaime

The Weaver and the Architect: Reconstructing the Modern Shelter
Kirsten Dahlquist (University of South Florida)
From Bauhaus to Black Mountain: constructus interruptus
John McClain (UNC-Asheville)

SUNDAY 2:00
Tour of Black Mountain College’s Lake Eden Campus
Connie Bostic (BMCM + AC)
Alice Sebrell (BMCM + AC)

With help from BMC Alumnus
Michael Rumaker

A look back at a beginning

Way back in 1976, when I returned to Asheville after my last stay in British Columbia, I faced the same problem I've heard many more recent arrivals complain of: it was hard to find meaningful work. So I worked as a baker in a now long-gone cafeteria (thankfully, I'd learned the trade in a small bakery in B.C.) and did various other odd jobs (some of them odd indeed) while I tried to find my first "real" job, one that would open possibilities that I might want to pursue as a "career". It finally came the next year, when UNCA hired me to replace Charles McLarty, who was leaving to return to school, as photographer for the Asheville Area Photographic Project.

Over the next eighteen months or so I took hundreds of shots of people and places of note in Asheville, and occasionally ranged out to surrounding towns, like Burnsville and Weaverville, either on my own, usually in search of a specific location someone had said I just had to photograph, or in the company of Dr. Lou Silveri, who was conducting an oral history project that summer. I had license to shoot pretty much whatever caught my eye.

It was a great way for me to ground myself in my new home, and some of the images I framed along the way, as I roamed the hills with my trusty Pentax Spotmatic II, have apparently been useful enough to others taking a look at that era that the Special Collections department of UNCA's Ramsey Library has now put them online.

The files are currently presented in the admirably compressed but not widely adopted Dejavu format; you'll need a viewer plugin for your browser to see them. Sorry. I know they've switched to the .jpg format for more recent collections.

The plugin does have a tool that exports the images into bitmats, and it's simple to convert bitmaps to compressed .jpg files with almost any decent viewer ... just sayin'.

The online presentation doesn't note which photos were taken by McLarty and which by me, but any shot in 1976 were McLarty's. He had a great eye, and was a superb printmaker. It took me months to develop darkroom techniques that yielded prints even almost as good as his. We both shot "black and white"; I loaded my own film canisters from bulk spools of Kodak Tri-X, and I think Charley did the same.

The website provides this history of the project:

In January 1976, the Center proposed a photographic survey of Asheville to be completed by a photographer hired with CETA money. Charles McLarty worked in this capacity from the Spring of 1976 to the Spring of 1977 and was then replaced by Jefferson Davis, another CETA sponsored-photographer who worked for the Center until May 1978.

The original design for the project included a photographic survey of Asheville in 1976, especially those areas destined for demolition or change. Also included was a record of Asheville's homes and street scapes which in some way would reflect the mood and feeling of the city in the mid-1970's. The photographers were also able to photograph individuals included in the Center's oral history collection and to shoot those areas mentioned in various studies housed in the Center.

As the project got under way, the photographers also suggested other themes, the most represented of which in this collection was a review of people at work, especially in occupations that were unusual or disappearing. Thus, one set of photographs depicts sorghum manufacture.

Those were shots I made of my uncles Wayne Landis and Ben Morgan at Wayne's McDowell County farm; sadly, they're not yet in the online collection.

In the Spring of 1978 the State Department of Archives dispatched a photographic team to Asheville to record the downtown area in preparation for a historical properties inventory. Because this project obviated the need for continuation of the project, all field work was stopped and emphasis was placed instead on copy work of existing collections acquired by the Center.

My job, in other words, became lab tech, instead of photographer. That's not what I'd signed on for, and I'm sure I let anyone within earshot know (politely, of course) that I wasn't exactly happy with the change. Fortunately, the CETA program needed a photographer to document its various projects, and I was able to arrange a transfer to the program staff.

But that's a story for another day.

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The photo features architectural detail from the Grove Arcade building in downtown Asheville; click on it for a larger version.