A school with no lanes

Black Mountain College was founded in North Carolina in 1933 by a group who had just walked out of Rollins College over a dispute about academic freedom. They started their own school in rented buildings, with no endowment and no accreditation, and made one structural decision that turned out to matter more than all the others: art was placed at the centre of the curriculum rather than at the edge of it.

Not art as a subject you could major in. Art as the thing everyone did, on the grounds that making something is how a person learns to look at anything. Students helped run the farm and put up the buildings. There were no conventional grades; you moved on when you could demonstrate that you were ready.

The list of people who passed through is absurd for a school that size: Buckminster Fuller trying to raise his first geodesic domes, John Cage and Merce Cunningham staging the untitled 1952 event that gets called the first happening, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ruth Asawa, Willem de Kooning, Charles Olson as rector at the end. It closed in 1957, broke.

Nobody was quite in their assigned lane, and that was the curriculum.

The useful thing to take from it is not nostalgia. It is a working assumption: that a poet in a room with a weaver and a dancer will produce something no department could have commissioned, and that the people this works best for are usually the ones who did not fit anywhere else. Misfits, in the literal sense. Hence the name up there.