To Open Eyes

“We do not always create ‘works of art,’ but rather experiments; it is not our ambition to fill museums: we are gathering experience.”

Josef Albers, Bauhaus Fundaments (Leap Before You Look p. 33)

“[Josef Alber’s] thought of teaching art as analogous to teaching a language, hence the students had to begin with the building blocks of aesthetics; he called drawing a ‘graphic language’ that was both a ‘visual and manual act.’ “

“Alber’s color course… proved that the experience of color was ultimately fungible.”

For example: Cutting up and collating bits of paper to see how they change in relationship to each other.

Helen Molesworth, Leap Before You Look (p. 34)

“The relativity of our experience of color has philosophical and ethical implications, as well. If our experience of a piece of colored paper can change so demonstrably, then what side footing do we have when we appeal to ‘common-sense’ truths like color?”

“forms are subject to perception - what Albers calls experience.”

“The task of training students to see, "to open eyes," as Albers often said, was to facilitate their critical awareness of the made qualities of the world around them, to make them self-aware of their own experiences to better prepare them for the democratic work of making considered choices.”

“Rather Albers insisted on the relativity of color, the perceptual instability of human experience, and the need for a constant performance or testing of innumerable variables.”

Helen Molesworth, Leap Before You Look (p. 41)

To Know Is Not Enough

“What you do with what you know is the important thing. To know is not enough.”

John Rice

“There were no letter grades at Black Mountain College, nor were there required courses, set curricula, standard examinations, or prescribed teaching methods.”


“When John Rice established Black Mountain College in 1933, he sought to create a school that dissolved distinctions between curricular and extracurricular activities, that conceived of education and life as deeply intertwined, and that placed the arts at the center rather than at the margins of learning.“

“For Rice, education was registered not by grades or other standard criteria but in a heightened desire to learn and to question, which would lead students to an expanded aptitude for solving a range of problems and to a richer sense of self.”


Leap Before You Look

A Progressive Education by Ruth Erikson

p. 77

Cross Pollination

“The summer sessions permitted an extraordinary form of cross-pollination.”

“Almost none of the summer faculty was paid a salary but received instead room and board and some relaxing time in the country.”

Helen Molesworth (Leap Before You Look, p. 42)

“The summer sessions modeled a form of artistic community, one that de Kooning took with him to New York in 1950, when he helped to found the Artists' Club, a gathering dedicated to the presentation of avant-garde ideas.“

“Black Mountain helped to establish the idea that an art school is a place of competing and diverse ideas, where the task of the faculty is to commit to a sense of rigor instead of personal taste, and the job of the students is to navigate the complexity of the options, in the hope of finding their own paths through what John Cage called "the big question," namely, "What are you going to do with your time?"

Helen Molesworth (Leap Before You Look, p. 45)

“the relation is not so much of teacher to student as of one member of the community to another.”

Black Mountain College Catalogue, (Leap Before You Look, p. 80)

“In essence there exists the utmost freedom for people to be what they please. There is simply no pattern of behavior, no criteria to live up to. People study what they please, as long as they want to, idle if they want to, graduate whenever they are willing to stand on examination, even after only a month here, or a year, or whatever, or they can waive all examinations, and graduations. They can attend classes, or stay away. They can work entirely by themselves, or they need not work whatever. They can be male, female, or fairy, married, single, or live in illicit love.”

Jack Tworkov (Leap Before You Look, p. 42)

*John Cage question from interview with Richard Kostelanetz (1968) in John Cage: An Anthology (1991) on pg 28

John Rice

“…there is something of the artist in everyone and the development of this talent, however small, carrying with it a severe discipline of its own, results in the students becoming more sensitive to order in the world and within himself than he can ever be through intellectual effort alone.”

John Rice, Black Mountain College Bulliten, 1935

via Look Before You Leap (p. 34)

Moving the Action Figures

Davy has reached the storytelling age.

Mix and match scripts from Zelda and Room on the Broom and Daniel Tiger.

John Hodgman reminding fiction writers that we're just playing make believe.

And that's where the magic is. 💫

"Then suddenly, when you're writing, a character will say something that you didn't think of.

Of course you did think of it, unconsciously. It's from your brain.

But only from a part of your brain that would never have been activated until you sat there and moved the action figures around enough."

John Hodgeman, This is a Secret Society