LOS ANGELES, CA.- This February, the Hammer Museum presents the West Coast debut of Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957, the first comprehensive U.S. museum exhibition on Black Mountain College (BMC), a small experimental school in North Carolina whose profound impact continues to influence art practice and pedagogy today. The exhibition chronicles how Black Mountain College became a seminal meeting place and dynamic crossroads for many of the artists, musicians, poets, and thinkers who would become leading practitioners of the postwar period. Figures including Anni and Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ruth Asawa, Robert Motherwell, Gwendolyn and Jacob Lawrence, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley, among many others, taught and studied at the college during this period and are featured in the exhibition.

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957 presents a rich and varied mixture of materials in the areas of painting, sculpture, weaving, and pottery, including over 250 objects by nearly 100 artists. True to the interdisciplinary nature of the school, the exhibition features two soundscapes, a grand piano, and a dance floor for live in-gallery performances, in addition to documentary photographs, archival ephemera such as books printed on campus by BMC poets, and audio recordings of poetry readings. The exhibition is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) and curated by Helen Molesworth, the ICA’s former Barbara Lee Chief Curator and current Chief Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and ICA Assistant Curator Ruth Erickson.

“We are thrilled to bring Leap Before You Look to the West Coast, honoring the values of the renowned experimental Black Mountain College and heralding its role in shaping major concepts, movements, and forms in postwar art and education,” said Ann Philbin, Director of the Hammer. “The exhibition, so thoughtfully presented by Helen Molesworth, underscores Black Mountain College’s interdisciplinary emphasis on inquiry, experimentation, and discussion, and reflects some of our deeply held beliefs in art and its capacity to expand one’s internal horizons and encourage participation in community.”

“Black Mountain College is an important historical precedent for thinking about relationships between art, pedagogy, democracy, and globalism—influences that can still be felt today,” said Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator of MOCA.

Founded in 1933 by John Rice, Black Mountain College placed the arts at the center of a liberal arts education and believed that doing so would better educate citizens for participation in a democratic society. BMC was strongly influenced by the utopian ideals of the progressive education movement, particularly the theories of John Dewey. The exhibition is organized into thematic sections, following a loose chronology, allowing each gallery to elucidate various aspects of BMC’s practice, pedagogy, and philosophy:

• The exhibition first focuses on Anni and Josef Albers, who came to Black Mountain College from the Bauhaus in Nazi-era Germany, when Josef Albers was hired to become BMC’s first head of the arts curriculum. Given the centrality of his pedagogy, and Anni’s writing and weaving, to the BMC experience, the section is dedicated to their work, including prints, paintings, photographs, and weavings made during their tenure at the college from 1933 to 1949.

• In the Teaching and Learning section, didactic tools that exemplified the college’s mission to teach through hands-on experimentation are on display, including the collaborative work of students and teachers, such as jewelry made by student Alexander Reed with Anni Albers using every day materials like corks, paper clips, and bobby pins. Models and studies for Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, first erected at BMC, are included alongside an examination of the role architectural building played at the college.

• In the Modernisms section, works by European artists such as Xanti Schawinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Josef Breitenbach are presented alongside paintings by a younger generation of American artists including Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Gwendolyn and Jacob Lawrence, and Franz Kline. In this section, the exhibition explores the concept of cosmopolitanism as a framework for understanding the unique position of BMC as a conduit between European and American avant-gardes that shaped the development of postwar artistic practice, movements, and teachings well beyond the college itself.

• The Haptic section of the exhibition includes a shuttle-craft practical loom used in Anni Albers’s workshop. Profoundly interdisciplinary, BMC gave rise to one of the twentieth century’s most legendary artistic collaborations: that of Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg. The exhibition features a sprung dance floor for live dance performances; a grand piano that will on occasion be “prepared” according Cage’s specifications; and a freestanding set decoration by Rauschenberg titled Minutiae (originally 1957). Sections of the exhibition emphasize both dance and music, including video and photographic documentation of performances and scores by John Cage. There will be live performances of Cunningham works performed on the stage in the gallery, including a rare opportunity to see the solo Changeling (1957), last performed by Cunningham in 1964, which will be performed by former Cunningham dancer Silas Riener. Full schedule of performances are at available at hammer.ucla.edu.

• Other sections of the exhibition examine the college’s critical role in the development of experimental literature in the United States, a period when poetry and pottery took on especially significant roles at BMC. The poet Charles Olson reimagines poetry as a field of action, ideas that became a catalyst for a generation of young American poets, many of whom Olson invited to teach at BMC, including Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. At the same time, the BMC pottery shop was formed and a series of influential ceramic artists taught at BMC, including Robert Turner, Karen Karnes, and Peter Voulkos.

The Los Angeles presentation of Leap Before You Look is at the Hammer Museum from February 21 to May 15, 2016 and coordinated by Anne Ellegood, Hammer senior curator, with MacKenzie Stevens, curatorial assistant, and January Parkos Arnall, curatorial assistant, Public Engagement.