Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Tuesday, January 30, 2018 in Conferences, Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Lectures, News, VRC.

Vanderbilt’s Department of Art and the Wond’ry present Chance Operations: Art and Education at Black Mountain College, a two-day interdisciplinary symposium (February 1-2) that will examine the contemporary relevance of Black Mountain College’s immersive teaching models on art, design, and education. Artists, curators, students and educators from various disciplines will illuminate Black Mountain’s unique pedagogical approach through lectures, roundtables, readings, concerts and performances.

On Thursday, February 1, at 6 pm in Cohen Hall 203, Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and co-curator with Helen Molesworth for the major exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, is the keynote speaker for the symposium with her lecture titled “Learning from Black Mountain College.”

Examining pedagogy at Black Mountain College, Erickson traces the ways that learning and living coalesced at the college to form a unique experimental environment. She will closely consider a range of examples, including class exercises, campus architecture, performance workshops, and artwork by Ray Johnson, Robert Rauschenberg, Ruth Asawa, and Merce Cunningham, to illuminate the culture of “making do” at the college, which, she argues, allowed for increased experimental ingenuity on the part of students and teachers.

At a reception following Erickson’s talk, Intermission Arts and New Dialect will perform Third Voice, a research lab and performance program incorporating newly composed music, video installation, and dance. The collaboration offers an opportunity for emerging composers and choreographers to connect and develop new works, very much in the spirit of the work done at Black Mountain College. Collaborators include New Dialect choreographers Rebecca Steinberg, James Barrett, Curtis Thomas, Spencer Grady, and David Flores, and Intermission composers George Miller, Christopher Bell, Nathaniel Banks (and Arlie), Spencer Channell, and Matt Kinney and Kay Kennedy. All pieces will be performed for the site-specific event at Cohen that evening.

Free and open to the public, the February 1 event is organized in conjunction with the Fine Arts Gallery exhibition, Looking Back (Looking Forward): The Black Mountain College Experience and John Warren’s Commons iSeminar, The Experimental Arts at Black Mountain College. The schedule of symposium events for Friday, February 2, continues here and will be held at Ingram Studio Arts Center, Room 220, and the Wond’ry.

The two-day symposium is supported by the Department of Art, Department of Theater, and The Wond’ry, with additional support from the Fine Arts Gallery, Department of History of Art, Blair School of Music, the Cinema and Media Arts program, The Ingram Commons, and StudioVU: The Department of Art Lecture Series..