Question: Near what city did Oli Sihvonen study art with Josef Albers?
Context: Homage to the Square: "Ascending" is a 1953 painting by artist Josef Albers.  The painting is currently held by the Whitney Museum.  The piece is from a larger series by Albers, called "Homage to the Square". The Greenville County Museum of Art (GCMA) is an art museum located in Greenville, South Carolina.  Its collections focus mainly on American art, and its holdings include works by Andrew Wyeth, Josef Albers, Jasper Johns (from South Carolina), Andy Warhol, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Ronnie Landfield, Helen Turner, Mary Tannahill, Eric Fischl, Marylyn Dintenfass, and Leon Golub.  Southern American and South Carolina-based artists, such as Henrietta Johnston, are also represented. John Andrew Rice Jr. (1888 – 1968) was the founder and first rector of Black Mountain College, located near Asheville, North Carolina.  During his time there, he introduced many unique methods of education which had not been implemented in any other experimental institution, attracting many important artists as contributing lecturers and mentors, including John Cage, Robert Creeley, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Franz Kline.  During World War II, he made it a haven for refugee European artists, including Josef Albers and Anni Albers, who arrived from the Bauhaus in Germany.  Later, Black Mountain College became the platform for the work of Buckminster Fuller, who made the college the site of the first geodesic dome.  Because of his strong ideas and unusual educational philosophy, Rice became involved in many debates in the socially conservative 1930s, '40s and '50s, becoming known as a very outspoken critic of the standard model of higher education in the United States. Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina (near Asheville, North Carolina), emphasized the study of art as central to a liberal arts education.  It was organized around John Dewey's principles of education.  Many of the school's faculty were influential in the arts or other fields, or went on to become influential, as did their students.  Although notable during its short life, the school closed in 1957 after 24 years.  The history and legacy of Black Mountain College are preserved and extended through Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, in downtown Asheville, NC. Oli Sihvonen (1921-1991) was a post-war American artist known for hard-edge abstract paintings.  Sihvonen's style was greatly influenced by Josef Albers who taught him color theory and Bauhaus aesthetics at Black Mountain College in the 1940s.  Sihvonen was also influenced by Russian Constructivism, Piet Mondrian, and Pierre Matisse.  His work has been linked to Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Hard-Edge and Op-Art. Architype Albers is a modular stencil sans-serif typeface based upon a series of experiments between 1926 and 1931 by Josef Albers, German designer, educator and typographer, (1888–1976).  The Architype Albers typeface is one of a collection of several revivals of early twentieth century typographic experimentation designed by Freda Sack and David Quay of The Foundry. Jack Stewart (January 27, 1926 – March 4, 2005) was an American artist.  Born in Atlanta, Georgia, he began private art lessons when he was seven.  When he was about nine he went to classes at the High Museum of Art.  In his early to mid-teens he apprenticed to the sculptor/painter Steffen Thomas.  During WWII he served in Patton's Third Army as a combat infantryman, entering combat in the Battle of the Bulge.  After the war he earned a BFA degree at Yale University, where he studied with Josef Albers and Willem de Kooning.  He studied architecture at Columbia University and later earned MA and Ph.D. degrees at New York University.  In 1976 Stewart married painter and art administrator Regina Serniak Stewart.  His first wife and their son are deceased. Eleanor de Laittre was an early proponent of abstract, cubist-inspired, and largely non-objective art.  During a period when representational art was the norm in the United States, she adhered to a style that was based on her study of paintings by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Paul Klee, and Raoul Dufy.  She was a member of American Abstract Artists, a group that flourished during the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s and that included among its members Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Werner Drewes, Suzy Frelinghuysen, A.E. Gallatin, Adolph Gottlieb, László Moholy-Nagy, George L.K. Morris, and Ad Reinhardt.  In 1939 de Laittre was recognized for her skill in handling the design of a painting she had placed in a group exhibition and was praised in general for her subtle handling of color.  Critical appraisal of her work remained positive in the 1940s and early 1950s and toward the end of her career she was honored as one of the best-known artists among those who strove to overcome resistance to abstract art in America. Elizabeth McCord (January 30, 1914 – April 18, 2008) was an American modernist painter whose colorful biomorphic and architectural abstractions influenced the hard-edge movement of the 1950s and were uniquely poised at the intersection of Southern California’s thriving mid-century art, design, and architecture scenes.  Her work frequently appeared in shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Art Association, and the Art Center College of Design alongside works by Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Josef Albers, June Wayne, and Knud Merrild, among others. Olivia Kapoor is best known as one of the pioneering Visionary Artists within the Inter-Dimensional Art Movement.  She is an American painter who has exhibited and showcased her work in Paris, London, Amsterdam, New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Toronto, and Bologna. Following the teachings of noted 19th and early 20th century faculty from The Bauhaus Modernist Art School, Kapoor continues to examine Wassily Kandinsky’s, Josef Albers’, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s, Paul Klee’s, and Johannes Itten’s exploration of the relationship of art, technology, and the universe.
Answer: Asheville, North Carolina