Licensing

Black Mountain College

Narrator: Daniell Cornell, Curator and Director of Contemporary Arts Projects, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

Transcription

At the end of her third year at Milwaukee State Teacher’s college in 1946, Ruth found that she was unable to complete her degree, because anti-Japanese sentiment was still so strong from the war that it was impossible for her to find a place that would accept her as a candidate for student teaching. And so, she decided to join her friends, Elaine Smith and Ray Johnson, fellow artists, to attend the summer session at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. This was a school that had been set up according to the progressive educational principles of John Dewey. And, Joseph and Annie Albers had come from the Bauhaus in Germany, where they had had to flee Nazi anti-Semitic sentiment during the war, and they had come to Black Mountain to establish the principles of organic design and art that underlined the teachings of the Bauhaus. And, Ruth was so taken by the principles that she found there that she translated them into her own aesthetic as she worked out these ideas in two-dimensional form.