Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Although it lasted only 23 years (1933-1956) and enrolled fewer than 1,200 students, Black Mountain College was one of the most fabled experimental institutions in art education and practice. Its art teachers included Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell, and among their students were John Chamberlain, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, and Cy Twombly. The performing arts teachers included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Lou Harrison, Roger Sessions, David Tudor, and Stefan Wolpe, and among the literature teachers and students were Robert Creeley, Fielding Dawson, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Francine du Plessix Gray, Charles Olson, M. C. Richards, and John Wieners.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Serving between 1933 and 1956 as a meeting point for some of the most imaginative artists, composers and writers of the period, Black Mountain College in southwestern North Carolina continues to exist as the mythical artistic birthplace of everyone from John Cage to Robert Creeley. Poet Vincent Katz curated a Black Mountain exhibition for Madrid's Reina Sofia museum, and here presents the school through a wonderful review of the artworks it produced and the varied geniuses who produced them. Artists Josef Albers, Kenneth Noland, Willem de Kooning and Franz Klein; dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham; poets Charles Olson and John Wieners; composers Lou Harrison and Stefan Wolpe; the unclassifiable Buckminster Fuller-all were integral to the tiny institution (about 50 students at any one time) and its practice-based curricula. Works by lesser known artists like Ilya Bolotowsky Theodoros Stamos acquire a further depth when placed among those by more familiar names, like Robert Motherwell. Candid photos are a highlight: the snapshot of painter Helen Frankenthaler and Ab-Ex critical proponent Clement Greenberg swimming in an onrushing ocean current would seem allegorical, if not for its immediacy. In the space of two covers, Katz manages to evoke a world of cross-media artistic possibility that seems as vast as it was often joyous. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This catalog accompanied a Madrid exhibition, 2002-03; it is not a catalog per se, but has numerous illustrations, many in color, of the work of artists discussed. Created during the Depression and drawing on European exiles before and during WW II, this short-lived experimental North Carolina College (1933-56) played a vital role in a period when American art saw a breakthrough into new forms; geometric abstraction to chance operations and photography are examined. A section on music and on the Review follow. Josef Albers was the influential teacher from 1933-49, when he was in a middle, very experimental phase. The poet and critic Charles Olson dominated the declining years. Summer Institutes inaugurated in 1944 brought remarkable individuals who interacted for short stints. The roster of now well-known names is incredibly long, including Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Esteban Vicente, the critic Clement Greenberg, composers Stefan Wolpe and John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham; Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland were also students. This complements rather than replaces Mary Emma Harris's The Arts at Black Mountain College (1987), with its broader examination of the community as a whole and richer documentation. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. J. J. Poesch emerita, Tulane University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, on May 21, 1926. He attended Harvard University and served in the American Field Service in India and Burma during World War II. In 1960, he received a Master's Degree from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

He taught at Black Mountain College, an experimental arts college in North Carolina, and was the editor of the Black Mountain Review. During his lifetime, he published more than sixty books of poetry including For Love: Poems 1950-1960, The Finger, Later, Mirrors, Memory Gardens, Echoes, Life and Death, and If I Were Writing This. In 1960, he won the Levinson Prize for a group of 10 poems published in Black Mountain Review. He also won the Shelley Memorial Award in 1981, the Frost Medal in 1987, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. He served as New York State Poet Laureate from 1989 to 1991.

He also wrote the novel The Island and a collection of short stories entitled The Gold Diggers. He edited several books including Charles Olson's Selected Poems, The Essential Burns, and Whitman: Selected Poems. He taught English at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He died on March 30, 2005 at the age of 78.

(Bowker Author Biography)