How did Albers come to Black Mountain College in North Carolina?
In 1933, a small group of disaffected faculty members at Rollins College in Florida decided to start a new college that would place its emphasis on the arts and communal living, rather than on required courses and grades. They found land and a facility at Black Mountain outside Asheville, North Carolina, bringing avant-garde artists to a region known for traditional crafts. On the recommendation of Philip Johnson at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, school organizers offered Josef Albers refuge from Nazi Germany to guide the art curriculum at Black Mountain. Josef and his wife, Anni, had both studied at the Bauhuas, a modernist art and design school in Germany, where Josef became a master teacher. The school closed under pressure from the Nazi regime in August 1933, and the Alberses came to North Carolina that fall. Internationally renowned artists that studied with Albers include Robert Rauschenberg and Asheville native Kenneth Noland. In addition to teaching, Albers helped bring other
