The Black Mountain College Yearbook is a digital archive dedicated to preserving the extensive history of an influential educational institution in Western North Carolina. This project aims to catalog and share the legacy of Black Mountain College, making its historical contributions accessible to a wider audience.
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The Black Mountain College Yearbook is a digital archive experiment we made with collecting institutions in the WNC area.
For anyone unfamiliar: Black Mountain College was a small, short-lived, wildly influential experimental school in Western North Carolina that operated from 1933 to 1957. Twenty-four years. Around 1,200 students total. And out of that tiny, mountain-bound community came some of the most consequential figures of 20th-century American art, design, music, poetry, and architecture; Josef and Anni Albers, Willem de Kooning, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenberg, and dozens more whose names you'd know if you spent any time in a museum.
Most of that history lives in archives, books, and the institutional memory of many WNC museums and beyond. The challenge with this project was that the material is rich but scattered, and the people who'd most love to spend an afternoon with it can't easily find their way in. The BMC Yearbook is our attempt to open that door.
It's a digital archive that organizes the college's history into three browsable threads; biographies of the people who passed through, collections that curate around themes and milestones, and a photo archive that captures the place itself. Built so a researcher, a student, a curious visitor, or a descendant can wander in without needing a finding aid to make sense of it.
If you've never heard of Black Mountain College, the Yearbook is a good way in. If you have, you already know why something like this matters. Check it out!