Revisiting Black Mountain

Experimentation as experience, self-determined learning and teaching, democratic coexistence: the Black Mountain College (1933–1957) in the USA was a place of lived utopia, a vanishing point of modernity, which has remained a projection screen for creative and social ideas to this day. Here Josef and Anni Albers taught after the closing of the Bauhaus, John Cage performed his first happenings, Merce Cunningham founded his dance company, and R. Buckminster Fuller built his domed structures. Black Mountain students included the sculptor Ruth Asawa and the painter Robert Rauschenberg. Part of ZHdK’s Revisiting Black Mountain program, this exhibition presents photographs, films, and documents that explore and illumine the interrelations between the arts, the fusion of art and life, and the very essence of creativity.