Black Mountain College catalogue cover

Black Mountain College catalogue cover

BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE

From the introduction to Kettle’s Yard’s 2006 Black Mountain College exhibition catalogue:

A Utopian dream born out of the Depression and the rise of Fascism, Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 as a result of a falling out within another American college. Despite its brief life and small scale, it proved to be one of the most productive experiments in the arts, education and community of the twentieth century. …Josef Albers and Charles Olson were the alpha and the omega of Black Mountain. The exhibition seeks to trace the unlikely threads between them, a complex line taking in the square, the circle, the tetrahedron and the glyph.

The task at hand was to make a coherent visual whole from an enormous amount of visual and textual material. The Bauhaus philosophy was a central part of the teaching at Black Mountain and the font we used here, Futura, was designed by Paul Renner who shared its views, believing that a modern typeface should express modern models.

Black Mountain College exhibition ident

Reflecting two of the central themes of the exhibition, 'Starting at Zero' and the circle, I produced this ident.

Pages from the catalogue for the Black Mountain College exhibition

Hazel Larsen Archer's photographs of Merce Cunningham dancing convey the dynamism at the heart of Black Mountain.

Black Mountain College catalogue spread

Poster for the Black Mountain College exhibition