Making Art History: Black Mountain College (ARTHIST 257, ARTHIST 457A)

5 credits · Undergraduate

In 1933, artists Anni and Josef Albers arrived in rural North Carolina to teach at Black Mountain College. Drawing on their years of experience teaching at the Bauhaus, the Albers emphasized practice before theory, learning by doing. Their lessons shaped generations of experimental artists, including Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and John Cage, among many others. Co-taught by an art historian and a physicist/artist, this course takes the Albers' pedagogy as its starting point. Our class sessions will recreate some of the Albers' foundational lessons in materials, design, drawing, and paper folding. What emerges when we begin art history with making rather than theory? How does the intelligence of the hand relate to knowledge of the past?