Founded in 1993, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, BMC’s life-line, settled into its present home last December. Its current exhibition provides an informative overview featuring an original sign, college bulletins, hand-made furniture, amusing event posters, curious photographs, a tiny loom, explanatory texts and dozens of related videos. One panel depicted BMC’s 1946 Prehistoric Specimens Wage Evolutionary Battle Against Modern Neurotcis, a conceptual football game that pit the Sticky Attitudes against the Cro-magnons on a trapezoid field that lacked parallel lines! A modest museum with a permanent collection, BMCMAC exhibitions regularly change, so check their web-site for current exhibitions and directions to BMC’s original campuses.

After a super delicious lunch at Tupelo Honey Cafe, we set out for Lake Eden (1941-1956) and the Blue Ridge Assembly (1933-1941), not knowing the sites’ accessibility. Camp Rockmont for boys bought the Lake Eden campus in 1956, so we were surprised to find its original dining hall (the site of BMC dances, plays and concerts) and Lawrence Kocher’s faculty and student-built, 60-year old Studies Building, still standing. Several Rockmont counselors and campers expressed their desire to tear down the modernist Studies Building (now called the Ship), which houses the camp’s offices, infirmary, store, ceramic classes and weight room, which they see as totally sticking out amidst the camp’s otherwise woody atmosphere. Since Jean Charlot’s fading frescos on its pylons are designated historical landmarks, the Ship is protected. We freely explored the grounds of the Blue Ridge Assembly, owned by the YMCA who built it in 1906. Its hill-top mansion, mentioned in BMC texts, dwarfs the slim Studies Building. Both sites offer incredibe views of the surrounding mountains.

En route to Raleigh, we drove around UNC-Chapel Hill and proceeded to look for a place to taste local micro-brews. So tiny a town, we suddenly found ourselves in neighboring Carrboro. As fortune would have it, Tyler’s, the Carroboro taproom a local recommended, celebrating “American Beer Month.” Who Knew? Our taste tests were cut short, since we wanted to drive onto Raleigh. Our visit to the North Carolina Museum of Art began with sculptures dispersed around its grounds. The museum’s gorgeous collection of historical painting are thoughtfully installed within the dynamic galleries, making this 1983 museum, designed by Edward Durrell Stones, one of the earliest examples of experiential architecture. With the exception of paintings by North Carolina artists Page Laughlin and McKendree Robbins Long, most works in Objects of Desire: The Museum Collects: 1994-2004 are requisite art historical inclusions. Most impressive is “The People’s Choice Award,” which invites visitors to select their five favorite works from Objects of Desire. Unlike most polls, this ingenious game requires greater scrutiny from the public, who transform museum acquisitions into objects of personal desire, thus forging future connections to the works. Highlights of NCMA’s permanent collection include Ernst Kirchner’s Panama Girls (1910-11), Lyonel Feininger’s The Green Bridge (1916), Robert Morris’s Untitled (1964) and Robert Motherwells’s Young Girl (1947). There was also a thorough exhibition of 19th century Hudson River School paintings on loan from the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.

NCMA’s sprawling Museum Park includes Robert Bladen’s Three Elements (1965) diving into the museum’s frontyard, Chris Drury’s musty Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky hidden in the woods and the collaborative text work PICTURE THIS, which intersects the Museum Park Theater, and provides seating to movie goers facing the giant screen dangling from the museum’s rear. Signage surrounding the museum’s stormwater retention pond announces the upcoming Art Pond. Mary Miss has been selected to improve the pond’s ability to process parking lot and roof runoff. Hopefully, Miss’s design will detour the cute geese, whose nitrogen-rich guano can cause algal bloom.

We then drove to the Weatherspoon Art Gallery at UNC-Greensboro to see painting exhibitions for James Hyde and Greensboro native, Warren Brandt. The guard, who caught me on the security camera photographing Shirley sitting on James Hyde’s styrofoam couch, asked me to refrain from photographing, even though he thought the photo clever! Less accessible for drive-thrus like us was the vast Videodrome, which screens ten plus hours of single-channel videos (75 videos by 30 artists) one at a time. Strangely enough, the eight minutes I most wanted to see, Assume Vivid Astro Focus’s two videos, were up next, yet I somehow missed them, so I’ll have to return next Sunday! American Art: Selections from the Permanent Collection, 1900-1960 was so American that I actually had flashbacks of being at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Before embarking on the 430-mile trek home, we stopped by Winston-Salem’s Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. Painted Saws: Jacob Kass offered the perfect complement to The Barnstormers, a magical exhibition featuring the far-flung efforts of the Barnstormers, founded by North Carolina native David Ellis. Since 1999, this Brooklyn-based collective has convened in Cameron to enliven old barns with grafitti-inspired imagery. Cameron locals not only helps them locate barns, but they provide food and housing, generating a beautiful exchange between a town of 280 and this international collective of 30 artists. The Barnstormers, who always paint for live audiences, record their improvisational process as time-elapsed videos. Whatever one paints risks being repainted, much the way grafitti artists tag over pre-existing graffiti. Most impressive was a massive wagon hauling scores of decorated cubic objects that have been transformed into makeshift speakers to blast the tunes that inspire them while working. They return to decorate a big rig parked in front of the museum and the barn inside. The Barnstormers will disassemble the barn and return it, so I can revisit it when I return to tour the over 20 barns sited in Cameron. As we curved northward through gorgeous mountain passes, North Carolina native David Sedaris read his short stories.

www.ashevilleart.org Asheville Art Museum web-site
www.blackmountaincollege.org BMC Museum + Arts Center web-site
www.southeasternmicroassocation.com Southeastern Microbrewers Assoc. web-site
www.ncartmuseum.org North Carolina Museum of Art web-site
www.weatherspoon.uncg.edu Weatherspoon Art Museum web-site.
www.secca.org Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art