Black Mountain College Site, North Carolina

Black Mountain College was a famously progressive and influential school that operated from 1933 to 1957, whose teachers and students included some of the best known artists of their time, such as Joseph and Anni Albers (who taught there for 17 years), Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly, Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Willem de Kooning, Walter Gropius, and Buckminster Fuller. The board of directors included William Carlos Williams and Albert Einstein. The school was on 650 acres around Eden Lake, surrounded by forest, near Asheville, North Carolina. The college closed due to financial instability, and the Albers moved on, to Yale. The site was immediately occupied by its new owners, Camp Rockmount, a Christian boys camp, which still operates today, and uses the rustic modernist main building from the college for its offices and arts and crafts activities.