The Hammer Museum on the UCLA campus can usually be counted on to deliver the goods. Their current show, “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957” is made up of work from both students and teachers. The school in the Blue Ridge Mountains set the template for art schools today. Its first director was Josef Albers who had been educated in the Bauhaus School but was forced to flee the Nazis that same year. He came here with his wife, Annie, and she was a force of her own. Brice Marden has made a career of her work.
Motherwell, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, Rauschenberg, Ben Shahn, Ray Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Elaine and William de Kooning, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Eric Satie, John Altoon and Robert Creeley all taught or were students here.
There was no house style, no uniform trend to art making here. Albers encouraged students to look longer, to see how something was made and to understand how visual information can be manipulated. Founded in the Depression and open through WWII the school had a Utopian culture of scarcity, an ethos of “making do.” I would enroll if it was still open. This show was the next best thing.
We used Uber for the first time to return to the canyon and hopped in my sister-in-law’s car for a drive to Venice in time to watch the sunset from our nephew’s office, the Swell headquarters. We had dinner at the “Tasting Kitchen” and walked the magical canals on the way home. Why do you think they call it Venice?
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Now I know how much fun you had in LA! We didn’t get to that part over our far too quick lunch. Kim