Practically every major artistic figure of the mid-twentieth century spent some time at Black Mountain College: Harry Callahan, Merce Cunningham, Walter Gropius, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Aaron Siskind, Cy Twombly - the list goes on and on. This book reveals the influence of Black Mountain College.

One of the most famous art schools in the US in the 1940s and 1950s was Black Mountain College, located in the rural heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. The war in Europe drew an astonishing array of artists and writers to its classrooms and studios. Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers ran Black Mountain College from 1938 to 1949, turning it into one of the most progressive schools in the country. Looking backward one can see that practically everyone who was anyone or became someone in the arts did a stint at Black Mountain, as faculty or student --or both: John Cage, Harry Callahan, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Duncan, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Alfred Kazin, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, Charles Olson, Ben Shahn, Arthur Siegel, Aaron Siskind, Theodoros Stamos, Jack Tworkov, Robert Motherwell, Peter Voulkos, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, John Chamberlain, Kenneth Snelson, and Ray Johnson. Until now scholars have depicted the college as a prologue in the careers of these artists. That, however, is changing. The Experimenters is the first study to examine how three key Black Mountain instructors--Josef Albers, John Cage, and R. Buckminster Fuller--taught new models of art making using the concept of experimentation. Focusing on specific studio projects, the book explores how faculty and students based their art on testing procedures rather than on personal expression. These procedures reconfigured the relationships among chance, order, and design, and helped redefine what art could be--and did become--for future generations.