Founded in 1933 in a small town in North Carolina, the storied Black Mountain College was in operation for just shy of 25 years, but continues to carry an outsize influence to this day. Emphasizing interdisciplinary work, community, and experimentation, the short-lived arts school counted among its faculty members such visionaries as Josef and Anni Albers, Willem de Kooning, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. Its board of directors included William Carlos Williams and Albert Einstein, and many more great thinkers and creatives were among its students: Ruth Asawa, Cy Twombly, Ray Johnson, and Robert Rauschenberg, to name just a few. Free of schooling conventions—no grades, no tests—students created their own curricula and were all required to participate in cooperative labor, working in the kitchen, on the farm, and on construction projects.

Their stories, as well as those of many lesser-known figures, will soon come to light, as the Asheville Art Museum works to bring its “hidden” Black Mountain College archives to the public for the first time. With its local proximity to the school, the museum’s holdings from that colorful period in history are especially rich—comprising nearly 20 percent of its entire collections—with many works donated directly from family members, friends, and relatives. We’ll be awaiting the museum’s digitized BMC archives with bated breath, and until then, stoking our fascination with a handful of indispensable reads, including Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College: 1933-1957, Black Mountain Poems: An Anthology, and The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College.