NCSU’s Best Kept Secret presents Mary Emma Harris speaking on Anni Albers at Black Mountain College
Thursday, October 4 at 7pm at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Talley Student Center, NCSU Campus
more info: 919-515-3503 www.ncsu.edu/gad
Mary Emma Harris gave a previous presentation at the Gregg Museum, titled “Architecture at Black Mountain College”, that was not to be missed. But you did miss it, didn’t you? Don’t make the same mistake twice. Over the past 15 years, the work of Anni Albers has continued to emerge from the shadow of her husband Josef, to reveal how truly ahead of her time she was. Apparently, her time is now.
In 1933, Josef and Anni Albers emigrated from Germany to the United States, where Josef had been asked to make the visual arts the center of the curriculum at the newly established Black Mountain College near Asheville. They remained at Black Mountain until 1949. Josef continued his exploration of a range of printmaking techniques and took off as an abstract painter, while continuing as a captivating teacher and writer. Anni made extraordinary weavings, developed new textiles, and taught, while also writing essays on design that reflected her independent and passionate vision.
Mary Emma Harris is the director of the Black Mountain College Project, a nonprofit corporation devoted to the documentation of the history of the college and preservation of documents related to the college. She is author of The Arts at Black Mountain College (MIT, 1987) and Remembering Black Mountain College (Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 1996).
Harris became interested in Black Mountain College in 1968 while a graduate student in art history at UNC-Chapel Hill. At the time, there was little interest in the school. It was generally considered to be a failed experiment in education, and was primarily remembered by the writing of the Black Mountain poets. After completing her studies at Chapel Hill, Harris left to work at the Detroit Institute of Art. While there, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to continue her work on the history of Black Mountain College. The papers collected in that project are now housed at the North Carolina State Archives. In 1999, Harris created the Black Mountain College Project to help preserve the papers of students and faculty, and to further document the history and influence of the college.
Learn more at the BMC project website.
More Black Mountain College photos here.
Thanks for the post, YeahYeahGirl, and this is a wonderful reminder of the treasures to be found in the NCSU art archives. I have been a huge fan of Black Mountain and its many outgrowths since the mid-seventies when I read Martin Duberman’s huge history of it (Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, Dutton 1972)and infuriated many people by inserting himself into the dialogues he created with interviews of the principals. But that book did its job by me. There were far more than writers there: Robert Rauschenberg argued through the issues behind his famous “white” painting there, and this lovely post sends us toward some beautiful art- don’t miss THESE links. Raleigh has been blessed with a couple of first class Black Mountain events, besides the previous Harris lecture which I did miss: Gilliam and Peden had an intimate show called Black Mountain Connection (they were showing serious art on Glenwood Avenue long before it was called “South”), and Ms. Harris herself wrote the huge tome (The Arts at Black Mountain College, MIT Press, 1987) that accompanied The NC Art Museum’s huge Black Mountain show of that year. The 24 years this place existed in a lovely valley right here in North Carolina were seminal for major art trends on a national level – thanks again for the reminder.
Just FY(and everyone else’s)I- the Gregg Museum at NCSU also houses the original model for Dorton Arena as well as numerous sketches of it and other projects by the architect Matthew Nowicki, not to mention heaps of other treasures which I plan to write about if I ever get my shit together.