Publisher: Atelier Éditions/Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, ISBN: 9781954957114, Author: David Silver, Format: Softcover, 24.1 x 17.8 cm, 240 pp
Black Mountain College (BMC) was a wellspring of 20th-century creative unorthodoxy. Through deep original research, this title follows renegade students, faculty & farmers as they establish a campus farm in the 1930s, build a better farm in the 1940s and watch it all collapse in the 1950s. In these engrossing pages, we encounter the extraordinary folk whose endeavours on the land helped shape the Black Mountain College of myth and extraordinary reality.
From its founding in 1933 and over its celebrated 23-year history, the small liberal arts school in rural North Carolina attracted a remarkable number of famous and soon-to-be famous artists, writers and visionaries including Anni and Josef Albers, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ray Johnson, Charles Olson and M.C. Richards. The exploits of these BMC cultural luminaries have been recounted time and time again.
David Silver’s fascinating new book offers a very different perspective. The farm was vital to BMC. Throughout the Depression and World War II it provided vital sustenance, while serving as a testing ground for self-sufficiency, communal living and collaboration—the most precious and precarious ingredient at the college.
David Silver (born 1968) is professor and chair of environmental studies at the University of San Francisco. He teaches classes on urban agriculture, hyperlocal food systems and food, culture and storytelling.