Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin
Black Mountain College, drama production, The Physician in Spite of Himself (Molière). Third from left: Betty Kelley, beside her, John Stix, behind her, Mendez Marks, 1941. Courtesy of Western Regional Archives, States Archives of North Carolina.
Black Mountain. An Interdisciplinary Experiment, 1933–1957
5 June–27 September 2015
Press conference: 4 June, 11am
Opening: 4 June, 7pm
Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin
Invalidenstrasse 50/51
10557 Berlin
Germany
Hours: Tuesday–Friday 10am–6pm,
Thursday 10am–8pm, Saturday–Sunday 11am–6pm
www.smb.museum/hbf
www.black-mountain-research.com
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Founded in 1933 in North Carolina, USA, Black Mountain College rapidly rose to fame on account of its progressive and at that time unique educational concept. Artists such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, and scholars such as Peter Bergmann, Natasha Goldowski, Max Dehn and Paul Radin were among the many prominent figures who taught or studied there. Inspired by the forward-thinking pedagogical ideas of philosopher John Dewey, the experimental, interdisciplinary educational institute exerted an enormous influence upon the development of the arts in the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition traces the history of this university experiment in its main outlines. In the first few years of its existence, the college was strongly shaped by German and European émigrés—among them several former Bauhaus members. After the Second World War, the creative impulses issued increasingly from young American artists and academics, who commuted between rural Black Mountain and the urban centres on the East and West Coast. Right up to its closure in 1957, the college remained imbued with the ideas of European modernism, the philosophy of American pragmatism and teaching methods that aimed to encourage personal initiative as well as the social competence of the individual.
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