Fellows&Friends @ Black Mountain College

Founded in 1933 in the U.S. state of North Carolina, Black Mountain College quickly gained fame for its progressive educational approach and the many prominent figures who taught and studied there, and it had a major influence on the development of the arts in the second half of the 20th century.

At the end of September, we visited the exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin with Fellows&Friends. This is the first time the museum has dedicated an extensive exhibition to the legendary college in Germany. Curator Gabriele Knapstein gave us a guided tour of the exhibition and provided fascinating insights into the curatorial concept and its development.

The college’s founders sought to establish a democratic, experience-based, interdisciplinary educational institution in line with the progressive educational ideas of the philosopher John Dewey. The exhibition traces the history of this university experiment in broad strokes. In its early years, the college was strongly influenced by German and European émigrés—among them several former Bauhaus teachers such as Josef and Anni Albers, Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky, and Walter Gropius. After World War II, creative impulses increasingly came from young American artists and scholars who commuted between the urban centers on the American East and West Coasts and the rural Black Mountain. Until its closure in 1957, the college remained shaped by the ideas of European modernism, the philosophy of American pragmatism, and a pedagogical approach that emphasized both individual initiative and social competence.