It looks like we don't have any summaries for this title yet. Be the first to contribute.
Learn more- "Black Mountain" is an hour-long historical mini-series about an experimental arts college that operated between 1933 and 1957 in the mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina. Founded under John Dewey's principles of "learn by doing" and "art as experience," the school was an ideal of democratic experimentation, a refuge for European intellectuals fleeing Nazi persecution, and a summer get-away for artists who went on to form The New York School. The college was progressive in its tolerant approach to race and sexuality, an incubator for the American avant-garde, and interpersonally a soap opera.
Season One opens with Helaine DeWitt's arrival at Black Mountain College in the fall of 1939, as the school battles its landlord who threatens to break their lease. A young potter from Indiana, Helaine runs away to Black Mountain to find the discipline, stimulation, and independence needed to thrive as a working woman artist in a hopelessly oppressive era. Sidling into Josef Albers's Design Course requires she appraise her weaknesses, discover her courage, and negotiate prickly emotional and academic betrayals. Frustrated with the limitations of pottery (and after abandoning weaving, printmaking, sculpture, painting, drawing, etc.), Helaine is drawn to photography, as a novel means to capture and distort the natural world around her. The first season ends as the students and faculty band together to break ground on their own Studies Building, hoping to stave off closure just a couple more years...
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content