Article: Mountains Ho! The Centrality of Experiencing the Blue Ridge Mountains at Black Mountain College

Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, Volume 16: Living with the Land
Published September 2025

Excerpt: 
Mountain. The word is at the center of Black Mountain College, and the town in which it existed. And both Black Mountain College campuses are surrounded by a rim of mountains: the Swannanoa Mountains to the South and the Great Craggy Mountains to the North. Everyone who arrived at the College could not help but notice being surrounded by these extensive mountain ranges as well as some of North Carolina’s highest mountain peaks.

While at the center of Black Mountain College and everyone’s experience living there, the mountains and landscapes surrounding the two BMC campuses have received little scholarly attention. I return to this topic after having lived in the town of Black Mountain for two years, during which I contemplated, hiked, and gazed out from the multiple peaks surrounding me. By focusing on the mountains around BMC, examining their geology, as well as how BMC faculty and students experienced them, I hope to show how central the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains were to people’s experiences at Black Mountain College.

Read the full article

Book: Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students

by Michael Beggs and Julie J. Thomson

Contributions by: Brenda Danilowitz, Erica Warren and Jennifer Nieling

 

 

A detailed study of the role and legacy of weaving at the legendary Black Mountain College
 
In the mid-twentieth century, Black Mountain College attracted a remarkable roster of artists, architects, and musicians. Yet the weaving classes taught by Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and six other faculty members are rarely mentioned or are often treated as mere craft lessons. This was far from the case: the weaving program was the school’s most sophisticated and successful design program. About ten percent of all Black Mountain College students took at least one class in weaving, including specialists like textile designers Lore Kadden Lindenfeld and Else Regensteiner, as well as students from other disciplines, like artists Ray Johnson and Robert Rauschenberg and architects Don Page and Claude Stoller. Drawing upon a wealth of unpublished material and archival photographs, Weaving at Black Mountain College rewrites history to show how weaving played a much larger role in the legendary art and design curriculum than previously assumed.
 
The book illustrates dozens of objects from private and public collections, many of which have never been shown in this context. Essays explore connections and networks fostered by Black Mountain weavers; the ways in which weaving at the college was linked to larger discourses about weaving and craft; and Bauhaus influences transmitted by way of Anni Albers. The book also includes works by five contemporary artists that connect and respond to the legacy of weaving at Black Mountain College today.
 
Distributed for the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
Hardcover, 216 pages, 90 color + 60 b-w illustrations, $40

Yale University Press page
Also available for purchase from the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

 

Exhibition: Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students

Weaving at Black Mountain College:
Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, NC
September 29, 2023 – January 6, 2024 

 
Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students will be the first exhibition devoted to textile practices at Black Mountain College (BMC). Celebrating 90 years since the college’s founding, the exhibition will reveal how weaving was a more significant part of BMC’s legendary art and design curriculum than previously assumed.

BMC’s weaving program was started in 1934 by Anni Albers and lasted until the College closed in 1956. Despite Albers’s elevated reputation, the persistent treatment of textile practices as women’s work or handicraft has often led to the discipline being ignored or underrepresented in previous scholarship and exhibitions about the College; this exhibition brings that work into the spotlight at last.

In addition to Albers, Trude Guermonprez taught her first classes in the U.S. at BMC, and Marli Ehrman and Tony Landreau brought their own perspectives on the discipline through their work and teaching. Among their students, some went on to find work as weavers, teachers, and textile designers, including Else Regensteiner, Lore Kadden Lindenfeld, Marilyn Bauer, Don Wight, and Joan Potter Loveless. Other students did not pursue future work in weaving but became successful artists and designers in their own right, including Ray Johnson, Don Page, Claude Stoller, Jane Slater Marquis, and Robert Rauschenberg.

 

Digital exhibition + talk recordings available here

Photograph: Will Hamlin, Mimi French in the BMC Weaving Workshop, ca. 1939-1940. Collection of BMCM+AC.

Zoom Meeting: Second Annual Ray Johnson (Un)Birthday Celebration

On Thursday, October 13 2022 from 6:30-7:30 pm, the second annual Ray Johnson (un)birthday celebration took place on Zoom. Co-hosted by Julie J. Thomson + Cary Loren.

This annual gathering of Ray Johnson fans and friends is held on or around Ray’s birthday to honor his life and art. (We know… he’d love to hate this!) 

Special guests this year were: John Walter, director of the award winning Ray Johnson biopic How to Draw a Bunny (2002), and Ellen Levy, Ray Johnson scholar and author of A Book About Ray (MIT press, 2024) and Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts (Oxford, 2011). 

Watch the recording here.

Zoom Meeting: Ray Johnson (Un)Birthday Celebration

Hosted by Cary Loren and The Book Beat, 26010 Greenfield Oak Park, Michigan
Thursday, October 14, 2021 

A Ray Johnson discussion and (Un)Birthday celebration held as an online Zoom Meeting to honor the artist. Cary Loren hosted the Meeting and John Held Jr., Richard Pieper, and Weslea Sidon joined me, since each of them interviewed Ray Johnson, and their interviews were published in That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson, which I edited.

Recording available: thebookbeat.com/backroom/2021/10/03/ray-johnsons-unbirthday/

Workshop: Environmental Humanities at Black Mountain College : Ray Johnson + Rivers, Hazel Larsen Archer + Trees, Jonathan Williams + Bluets, Stan VanDerBeek + Willow Reeds + Making John Cage’s Mud Pies

Environmental Humanities at Black Mountain College: 

Ray Johnson + Rivers, Hazel Larsen Archer + Trees, Jonathan Williams + Bluets, Stan VanDerBeek + Willow Reeds + Making John Cage’s Mud Pies

Saturday, September 20, 2019
ReViewing Black Mountain College 11

While art was at the center of the curriculum at Black Mountain College I offer that nature and experiences outdoor were also part of the curriculum there. When interviewed it was sometimes hard for people to put into words the effect of the landscape on them, however their experience of being outdoors, and the varied ways in which they were exposed to natural materials, can be found in their work. For this presentation I shared examples found in the work of five of the College’s artists: Ray Johnson, Hazel Larsen Archer Jonathan Williams, Stan VanDerBeek, and John Cage. 

My talk ended with an invitation to make Mud Pies, after a collaborative reading of John Cage’s and Lois Long’s Mud Book. 

My hope is that this discussion, and multisensory experience, offers us opportunities to connect to Black Mountain College through natural experiences.  

Book- That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson

THAT WAS THE ANSWER:

INTERVIEWS WITH RAY JOHNSON

Edited by Julie J. Thomson

Publication date: September 4, 2018

Published by Soberscove Press
Distributed by ARTBOOK / D.A.P.

https://soberscove.com/book/that-was-the-answer/

Ray Johnson (1927–1995) was a singular artist, whose life and work were inextricably linked. Born in Detroit, Johnson attended Black Mountain College before moving to New York, where his work anticipated Pop art and he was active in early Fluxus circles. Best known for his collages and Mail art activities, including what became known as the New York Correspondence School, he operated fluidly in a wide range of modes. For Johnson, everything and everyone were potential material for his art—any form could become a space for artistic activity—and the form of the interview proved no exception.

That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson brings together a selection of interviews and conversations from 1963 to 1987 that offer unique access to Johnson’s distinctive thinking and working methods. Throughout, Johnson’s responses are marked by his humor and close attention to language. Gathering these interviews for the first time, That Was the Answer serves as an exceptional introduction to Ray Johnson as well as a resource for those who are interested in gaining deeper insight into this artist and his kaleidoscopic body of work.

Talk- Two Ways of Looking at Black Mountain College: Ray Johnson and also the Photographers

Two Ways of Looking at Black Mountain College: Ray Johnson and also the Photographers

Wednesday, March 28, 2018, 6:00pm

Turchin Center for the Visual Arts

Black Mountain College Semester, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC

In this talk I will combine and share my two areas of research and writing about artists who were at Black Mountain College. The first part will focus on Ray Johnson who was a student at Black Mountain College (1945–48). Johnson led to my interest in the photographers who were at Black Mountain College and the second part of my talk will focus on them and the 2017 exhibition Begin to See:The Photographers of Black Mountain College that I curated.

Talk- Birds in American Art

Birds in American Art

Monday, March, 26, 2018, 7:30 p.m.

Chapel Hill Bird Club

Birds have been the subject of, and the inspiration for, many American artists. I will present an overview of birds in American art from the nineteenth century through today. Artists whose work will be discussed include Alexander Wilson, John James Audubon, Genevieve Estelle Jones, Charles Willson Peale, Titian Ramsay Peale, Winslow Homer, Frank Weston Benson, Marsden Hartley, Charles Burchfield, Walter Inglis Anderson, Andrew Wyeth, Joseph Cornell, Eliot Porter, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Ray Johnson, Robert Adams, Howard Finster, Walton Ford, David Beck, Rachel Berwick, Mark Bradford, Mark Dion, Chris Jordan, Joann Brennan, and Barbara Bosworth. 

Essay-"To Dick From Ray: Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press, Ray Johnson, and The Paper Snake" and Panel Discussion- Snakes Escape

My essay To Dick From Ray: Dick Higgins’s Something  Else Press, Ray Johnson, and The Paper Snake was published in the booklet accompanying the exhibit SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY: Ray Johnson, Dick Higgins + the making of THE PAPER SNAKE curated by Michael von Uchtrup at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center. View the full booklet.

Snakes Escape panel discussion with Michael von Uchtrup + Julie J. Thomson, moderated by Brian E. Butler, June 6, 2015, Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center.

Talk- "To Dick from Ray: Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press and Ray Johnson’s The Paper Snake"

"To Dick from Ray: Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press and Ray Johnson’s The Paper Snake"

Paper presented at ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 6: The Writers of Black Mountain College
September 27, 2014
University of North Carolina, Asheville, North Carolina.

Essay- The Art of Graphic Design: Alvin Lustig, Josef Albers, Ray Johnson, and the 1945 Summer Session

My essay "The Art of Graphic Design: Alvin Lustig, Josef Albers, Ray Johnson, and the 1945 Summer Session" was published in Volume 6 of Black Mountain College Studies, Summer 2014.

Talk- "The Art of Graphic Design: Alvin Lustig, Josef Albers, Ray Johnson, and the 1945 Summer Session"

"The Art of Graphic Design: Alvin Lustig, Josef Albers, Ray Johnson, and the 1945 Summer Session"

Paper presented at ReVIEWING Black Mountain College5: Shaping Craft + Design
October 12, 2013
University of North Carolina, Asheville, North Carolina.

Talk (Video)- One Makes Many Poetics Conference

Videos from the One Makes Many: A Conference of Poetic Interactions are now online.

I presented a revised version of my Josef Albers and Ray Johnson essay on the Black Mountain College Panel, the video at the bottom of this page.

http://onemakesmany.siteslab.org/videos-one-makes-many-2011

If you are pressed for time, please note my talk begins around 25 minutes.

Talk- "How to Make an Artist: Josef Albers and Ray Johnson"

“How to Make an Artist: Josef Albers and Ray Johnson”

Paper presented as part of a Black Mountain College panels at One Makes Many: A Conference of Poetic Interactions.
Duke University and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
November 12, 2011
Conference website

Essay- Ray Johnson Issue of the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies

“To Ray J, George Brecht Knows, George Brecht’s Nose: The Development of Ray Johnson’s and George Brecht’s Participatory and Dialogic Practices”
and
“Reading Ray: VanDerBeek Deep” Project introduction here and my project essay here.

Two essays published in The Ray Johnson Issue of the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies
Issue 2, Fall 2011

Talk- "John Cage's Experimental Composition Class and Participatory Aesthetics in the 1950s and 1960s"

“John Cage’s Experimental Composition Class and Participatory Aesthetics in the 1950s and 1960s”

Paper presented at ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 3: An International Conference
October 8, 2011
University of North Carolina, Asheville, North Carolina.


For this conference I also organized a Mushroom Walk at the Lake Eden Campus since Cage also taught a Mycology class at the New School and was a great amateur mycologist. It was led by Charlotte Caplan, President of the Asheville Mushroom Club.

Essay- "Always Something to See: Ray Johnson and George Brecht in the Early 1960s"

"Always Something to See: Ray Johnson and George Brecht in the Early 1960s"

Read this essay published in the Core Program Yearbook
The Core Program at the Glassell School of Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston
2011
Copies of the yearbook can be obtained from the Core Program.

Talk- "To Ray J, George Brecht Knows, George Brecht's Nose: The Exchanges Between Ray Johnson and George Brecht"

“To Ray J, George Brecht Knows, George Brecht’s Nose: The Exchanges Between Ray Johnson and George Brecht”

Paper presented at ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 2: An International Conference (scroll down for information about the second conference).
October 9, 2010
University of North Carolina, Asheville, North Carolina.

Essay- "How to Make an Artist: The Teaching of Josef Albers and Ray Johnson's Work"

"How to Make an Artist: The Teaching of Josef Albers and Ray Johnson’s Work”

Published in the exhibition catalogue From BMC to NYC: The Tutelary Years of Ray Johnson (1943-1966).

Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, Asheville, North Carolina, 2010.
Catalogue available for purchase here.