Black Mountain College: A Thumbnail Sketch is a 13-minute documentary about a legendary, experimental college founded by John Andrew Rice along with a few others in 1933. The college was located in the mountains of North Carolina, and its students were taught using a project-based, holistic learning method.
From Wikipedia:
Black Mountain was experimental in nature and committed to an interdisciplinary approach, prioritizing art-making as a necessary component of education and attracting a faculty and lecturers that included many of America's leading visual artists, composers, poets, and designers. The school operated using non-hierarchical methodologies that placed students and educators on the same plane. Revolving around 20th-century ideals about the value and importance of balancing education, art, and cooperative labor, students were required to participate in farm work, construction projects, and kitchen duty as part of their holistic education.
Many of the schools students and faculty played a major role in shaping the American avant-garde and became well-known artists, such as "Josef and Anni Albers, Charles Olson, Ruth Asawa, Walter Gropius, Ray Johnson, Robert Motherwell, Dorothea Rockburne, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Weil, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Franz Kline, Aaron Siskind, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and Mary Caroline Richards."
Due to funding issues, the school had to close down in 1957 after existing for 24 years. I wish this incredible school was still around today.
