page_title: Black Mountain College
section_title: Structure
hierarchical_section_title: Black Mountain College / Structure
caption_attribution_description: English: Robert E. Lee Hall, the main building of the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was the location of Black Mountain College for its first eight years, 1933-1941.
context_page_description: Black Mountain College was an experimental college founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and several others. Based in Black Mountain, North Carolina, the school was ideologically organized around John Dewey's principles of education, which emphasized holistic learning and the study of art as central to a liberal arts education. Many of the school's faculty and students were or would go on to become highly influential in the arts, including Josef and Anni Albers, Charles Olson, Ruth Asawa, Walter Gropius, Ray Johnson, Robert Motherwell, Dorothea Rockburne, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Weil, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Franz Kline, Aaron Siskind, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and Mary Caroline Richards. Although it was quite notable during its lifetime, the school closed in 1957 after 24 years due to funding issues. The history and legacy of Black Mountain College are preserved and extended by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center located in downtown Asheville, North Carolina.
context_section_description: The school operated using non-hierarchical methodologies that placed students and educators on the same plane. Revolving around 20th-century ideals about the value and importance of balancing education, art, and cooperative labor, students were required to participate in farm work, construction projects, and kitchen duty as part of their holistic education. The students were involved at all levels of institutional decision-making. They were also left in charge of deciding when they were ready to graduate, which notoriously few ever did. There were no course requirements, official grades (except for transfer purposes), or accredited degrees. Graduates were presented with handcrafted diplomas as purely ceremonial symbols of their achievement. The liberal arts program offered at Black Mountain was broad, and supplemented by art making as a means of cultivating creative thinking within all fields. While Albers led the school, the only two requirements were a course on materials and form taught by Albers and a course on Plato.
caption: From 1933 to 1941, Black Mountain College was located at the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly.
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