CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/12/2024

A fresh new take on Black Mountain College

Ever since the wild and wooly, experimental art and design program at Black Mountain College shuttered its doors in 1957, its legend has continued to grow. Nearly all of the books and exhibitions about it have focused on its “jaw-dropping band of famous and soon-to-be-famous artists, writers, thinkers and visionaries from the US, Europe and beyond, a veritable who’s who of mid-20th-century Western art and ideas.” In his enlightening new book from Atelier Éditions and Black Mountain College Museum, author David Silver proposes a welcome new take, examining the school through its utopian, self-made, and ultimately not-self-sustaining agriculture program. “The farm was of vital importance to the college,” Silver writes, “not only because it provided necessary food from organic farming, but because it served as a testing ground for self-sufficiency, communal living and collaboration—the most precious and precarious ingredient at the college. In these pages, the spotlight is on the extraordinary contributions of these folk, many of whose stories have seldom, if ever, been explored.” Spreads are from The Farm at Black Mountain.