Hammer Museum announces ‘Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957’
The Hammer Museum at UCLA offers collections, exhibitions, and programs that span the classic to the contemporary in art, architecture, and design. The Hammer’s international exhibition program focuses on wide-ranging thematic and monographic exhibitions, highlighting contemporary art since the 1960s and the work of emerging artists through Hammer Projects and the Hammer’s biennial, Made in L.A. As a cultural center, the Hammer Museum offers nearly 300 free public programs a year, including lectures, readings, symposia, film screenings, and music performances.
"This February, the Hammer Museum at UCLA 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, a small, experimental school in North Carolina which had a profound impact that continues to influence art practice and pedagogy today.
The exhibition, which will run from Feb. 21 through May 15, 2016, 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, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, among many others, taught and studied at the college during this period and will be featured in the exhibition.
“Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957” will present a rich mixture of materials in the areas of painting, sculpture, weaving and pottery, including more than 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 Black Mountain College poets, and audio recordings of poetry readings."— Nancy Lee, Dec. 3
Read the full article at the UCLA Newsroom website.