Event 1: Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957

Last week I went to Hammer Museum to see the exhibition of Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957. It was truly an impressive exhibition. It shows me a totally different way of education. By focusing on liberal art education, the faculty and students in Black Mountain College became influential in art history and left us with many beautiful artworks.

In the first lecture, we read about C.P. Snow’s most famous work, “The Two Cultures”. In his book, Snow describes the problem occurred during contemporary education. He said the education shut people’s senses off and made everyone standardized. Divergent thinking should be an important process of creativity, and humanity should be in conjunction with the science. To be honest, I didn’t incorporate art in my study until this class. I only cared about math equations, physics experiment before. If I can attend an institution like Black Mountain College, I would be really surprised and motivated.

 
The Black Mountain College encourages students to develop their senses, including the haptic, music, dancing…Students may combine whatever they like in the artwork. For example, the black sculpture uses two trigonometry curves to be the mean parts and makes the object like a net. It makes people feel that they are seeing something real but wispy. In another picture, the author used different geometric shapes including squares, triangles, rectangles and lines to express multiple colors. And in the work “Study for Pyramid”, the artist made a superposition of three dancing figures. It’s not a pyramid but also has the idea of orthocenter to make the tall and thin sculpture be in equilibrium.  

Finally, the Black Mountain College employed John Dewey’s philosophy of “learning by doing”. Teachers taught students the method of solving problems. Apart from the art courses, students also learned practical courses like photography, weaving and wood-working and science subjects like chemistry, biology and math. It’s truly a combination of art and science education. Though it only existed for a short time, the Black Mountain College should be a role model for contemporary education. I highly recommend this event, because we can use their education pedagogy to improve our own studies.

me in Hammer Museum(this "chair" is really interesting)

Sources:

Snow, C. P. “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Reading. 1959. New York: Cambridge UP, 1961. Print.