“The summer sessions permitted an extraordinary form of cross-pollination.”
“Almost none of the summer faculty was paid a salary but received instead room and board and some relaxing time in the country.”
Helen Molesworth (Leap Before You Look, p. 42)
“The summer sessions modeled a form of artistic community, one that de Kooning took with him to New York in 1950, when he helped to found the Artists' Club, a gathering dedicated to the presentation of avant-garde ideas.“
“Black Mountain helped to establish the idea that an art school is a place of competing and diverse ideas, where the task of the faculty is to commit to a sense of rigor instead of personal taste, and the job of the students is to navigate the complexity of the options, in the hope of finding their own paths through what John Cage called "the big question," namely, "What are you going to do with your time?"
Helen Molesworth (Leap Before You Look, p. 45)
“the relation is not so much of teacher to student as of one member of the community to another.”
Black Mountain College Catalogue, (Leap Before You Look, p. 80)
“In essence there exists the utmost freedom for people to be what they please. There is simply no pattern of behavior, no criteria to live up to. People study what they please, as long as they want to, idle if they want to, graduate whenever they are willing to stand on examination, even after only a month here, or a year, or whatever, or they can waive all examinations, and graduations. They can attend classes, or stay away. They can work entirely by themselves, or they need not work whatever. They can be male, female, or fairy, married, single, or live in illicit love.”
Jack Tworkov (Leap Before You Look, p. 42)
*John Cage question from interview with Richard Kostelanetz (1968) in John Cage: An Anthology (1991) on pg 28