Leap before you look

by Helen Anne Molesworth

In 1933, John Rice founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina as an experiment in making the arts central to learning. Though it operated for only twenty-four years, this pioneering school played a significant role in fostering avant-garde art, music, dance, and poetry, and an astonishing number of important artists taught or studied there. Among the instructors were Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, R. Buckminster Fuller, Karen Karnes, Willem de Kooning, and M.C. Richards, and students included Ruth Asawa, John Chamberlain, Ray Johnson, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy...