Value Studies: Upper-Level Member Preview

Thursday, December 17 • 4–5pm | Upper-Level Members

As a valued Museum Upper-Level Member, we invite you to join us for the exclusive preview of our upcoming exhibition, Value Studies: Artmaking and Worldmaking at Black Mountain College.

About the Exhibition

Value Studies brings together highlights from the Museum’s permanent collection and key loans to consider Black Mountain College (1933–1957) as a site where students and faculty modeled new ways of living, learning, and relating to one another. This practice of imagining new worlds, and enacting them collectively, arose during a moment of profound uncertainty in American history that prompted many people to rethink the values, institutions, and relationships ordering their everyday lives—and offered the possibility of creating alternative futures.

The exhibition’s three sections—Color Studies, Material Studies, and Figure Studies—use foundational classroom exercises as conceptual frameworks for exploring the BMC community’s ethics in action, revealing the values at the heart of their vision for the future. Featuring significant works by Anni & Josef Albers, Ruth Asawa, Elaine & Willem de Kooning, Gwendolyn Knight & Jacob Lawrence, and Robert Rauschenberg, among many others, Value Studies explores the new worlds being made at Black Mountain College—offering viewers the opportunity to consider how they themselves might question, envision, and actively shape the world around them.

This exhibition is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.