On a dark, chilly evening in November 1839, a woman in Boston, Massachusetts, convened a party at her friend’s house. That might seem an unremarkable event, but this was not a high-society tea party or wine-tippling book club. It was a bold social experiment. The hostess was the 29-year-old journalist Margaret Fuller, and the guest list was composed of the most finely tuned minds she could collect—minds that nevertheless, by virtue of being women, were barred from attending university. Safely concealed from the prying outside world by the guise of innocent domesticity, they were taking their education into their own hands. They were about to have a “Conversation,” with Fuller leading the way in the informal role of instructor.

Maybe more of us should be having such conversations. With fall approaching, thousands of high-school seniors are in the throes of the fraught “college search,” an anxiety-ridden affair that, for many, culminates in years of astronomical debt. Between the rising cost of higher education, the “devaluation” of degrees, and the COVID-19 pandemic’s shakeup of education—not to mention the culture wars over critical race theory and free speech—there is rising interest in finding other ways to prepare oneself for a rewarding professional and intellectual life. The resourcefulness of Margaret Fuller and her acquaintances—and the accomplishments that followed their budget-friendly, self-engineered education—show us that the foundations of a fulfilling life and career can be built on curiosity and willpower rather than loans.

The premise of a Fuller “Conversation” was simple: anything that wasn’t stale tea party table talk was permitted. There would be no petty gossip, no complaints about children or servants, no exchanging of recipes or sewing tips. And unlike the salons of the time, there would be no men to impress. Instead, the curriculum was an in-depth discussion on fine art, literature, science, politics, or mythology—with corresponding homework in between these two-hour weekly meetings. At the sixth conversation, the women discussed wisdom and the mechanics of art; for the seventh, they wrote, shared, and critiqued their own essays on beauty.

By 1839, Fuller had already made a name for herself as a writer, with publications in distinguished journals such as the North American Review and the Western Messenger. She was trained in the classics, talented as a critic, translated German Romantic literature into English, and was so outstandingly bright that regardless of her gender, she was hailed as something of an authority on anything highbrow. Yet she understood that it wasn’t mere writing talent that had afforded her the rare privilege of a professional life. Fuller had benefited from an extensive education and access to the reading materials and intellectual social circles she needed to cultivate her mind for a productive life, and she wanted to share the additional elements of good connections and directed study with others. She’d worked as a teacher already, having served at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston in 1836 and at Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1837, and the role came as naturally to her as the instinct to combine it with that of an author.

Still, the Conversations had their adversaries: privileged, bookish men who felt threatened by this clever female innovation—which made their prestigious and expensive university educations suddenly not so special anymore. Historian Charles Capper writes that they tried to conceal their obvious sexism behind religious objection—they were “scandalized” by the women’s discussion of Transcendental critiques of Christianity.

The Conversations continued until April 1844. Though only a five-year enterprise, they left a lasting mark, including forming the base material for Fuller’s 1845 feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century. There, she laid out her stern commentaries on the inequalities between the sexes and what needed to be done to remedy them for society’s benefit. The intrepid  educational reformist Peabody, whose home was the site of the discussions, went on to find the first English-language kindergarten in the U.S., in 1860. Sophia Ripley, a fellow feminist and philosopher, went on to become a primary school teacher at a progressive academy, and Caroline Sturgis Tappan, an ambitious Transcendentalist artist, published poetry and children’s books.

The Conversations have also served as a source of inspiration for factions of frustrated women who came after Fuller. Lara D. Burnett of the University of California claims that Fuller’s Conversations serve as the early model for the current phenomenon of podcasts, a technological platform through which creatives in pairs or groups can explore and discuss their niche interests vocally (an especially useful means of expression for modern-day women who are still being barred and/or systematically discouraged from mounting traditional podiums). It’s an equal, open space, where all women are free to participate as either speakers or listeners and can hope to be taken seriously. “Conversations allowed Fuller to be a kind of professor, and allowed her subscribers to participate in a kind of university course, without vetting by those who were determined to marginalize female intellectual work,” Burnett astutely observes. “Similarly, podcasts can, without any gatekeeping, make available to their producers and their listeners the conversational practices of the seminar room.”

Today, women can and do attend university, but the bittersweet reality is that not everyone can afford to partake. In this modern context, underground education is once again prevailing.  One example is the Dark Academia movement, a clothing and lifestyle culture born on TikTok that embraces the aesthetic of a 19th-century academic with some worldly flair. But it doesn’t end at looks. Dark academia appeals most to teenagers who are dissatisfied with their current education, defeated by higher education’s price tag, and have discovered the joys and benefits of self-directed study.

Though a degree is still necessary for certain jobs, it’s not essential for developing an original, critical, and respectful mind. There are always opportunities for full, rewarding, and meaningful conversations. Getting together to debate Sartre or new developments in gender politics can be done in any time period, in any available setting—tuition-free. And whether you do it on Zoom or at a friend’s place, stop and listen for Fuller’s voice, broadcasting through from a long-gone era.

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The exhibition documents the amazing achievements of students and teachers at a tiny experimental school called Black Mountain College, improbably functioning from 1933 to 1957 in the mountains of western North Carolina. Day by day, over years, innovators as diverse as Bauhaus-trained painter Josef Albers and American poet Robert Creeley found space there to explore possibilities of their own work and to collaborate in providing an education with art at the very center.

Today, names like John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jacob Lawrence, Willem de Kooning, Anni Albers, Charles Olson, and Buckminster Fuller are touchstones in the worlds of music, dance, art, crafts, poetry, design.

Hazel Larsen Archer, Merce Cunningham Dancing, c. 1952-53.

 
In 1955, the summer I was 18, most of Black Mountain’s “names” were barely known, let alone celebrated—and while I did have fun, I encountered something far more serious.

1955 was the dark ages. Especially in the South. Chapel Hill, where I lived, had just one bookstore, one record store. No black people went to the university. Carrboro, right next door, wasn’t known for roots music. It was a hardcore Southern mill town, rigidly segregated as everything was. At the mill, black men got janitor and loading jobs only.

Hypocritical standards for female behavior loomed everywhere. Being liked by boys was the highest achievement open to young Southern white women. Thus I was inured to a “boys won’t like you if …” refrain. If you don’t wear lots of lipstick. If you talk too loud. If you argue. If you get known as “easy.” If you don’t.

Education had a clear, stay-in-line structure, including the unspoken instruction for women: Be sure to catch a husband by graduation time. Women could not even attend the university at Chapel Hill until their junior year, and the flood of co-eds entering from the women’s branch in Greensboro seemed singularly devoted to husband-seeking. I found a few exceptions in university art classes, which I was able to take while I was still in high school, because my father was on the university staff. (He was director of the University of North Carolina Press.)

Small wonder I was sulky, resentful, and, despite a few small adventures, very, very lonely.

Then one June day I was on a Trailways Bus bound for the summer session at an obscure place called Black Mountain College. I’d learned of it through The Black Mountain Review magazine in the university library. But I’d been given wildly diverse descriptions from everyone I asked. “Is it still open?” “Full of communists and Negro lovers!” “It might be interesting for you. Is Eric Bentley (a New York theatre critic) still there?” (He had been, in the early 1940s. Not any more.)

I wasn’t sure the place I was headed to was even real. But I’d been informed the school dining hall was closed, so stuffed in my duffle bag was a one-burner hot plate and a small iron frying pan liberated from my mother’s kitchen.

Two students in a rust-bucket car were at the bus stop to pick me up. The red-haired one just drove. The other, in a flat Boston accent, talked on and on. There’s a big party tonight to kick off the summer. You have to come. You’ll meet everyone. You’ll be shocked at how big Charles Olson is. Six foot seven. And he rattled on about an amazing work called The Maximus Poems that Charles Olson was in the midst of writing. I’d seen Olson’s name in The Black Mountain Review, where his writing and that of others had shocked and intrigued me.

He said I could choose my classes when I talked to Charles, who was head of the school, and Wes Huss, the theater teacher and school treasurer. Nothing was assigned, he assured me. Nothing was required. I could ask for tutorials. I could come and go as I wanted. All the studio art classes were taught by a painter, Joe Fiore. Other painters from New York were sure to visit later to review graduation shows. That was how it worked. If, and he said it was an “if,” one worked for graduation. Lots of people didn’t. A person could simply work. Like real life.

Joseph Fiore, Black Mountain, Lake Eden, 1954.

 
He laughed.

I was reeling after the five-mile drive. We stopped at a gravel turnaround at the entrance to a fabulously austere, long, white building, resting like a ship by the side of a small lake. The Studies Building. “Students built it,” my impromptu guide reported breathlessly, dragging my duffle into the small entryway.

“Your education belongs to you,” Charles Olson began. He was in his office along with Wes but sunk into a butt-sprung easy chair, the springs of which may have been on the floor. I had no sense of his size.

“You are responsible for what you want to do here,” he told me.

The more I thought about that, later that day and beyond, the more dazzling and more frightening it became. What did I want? I had come for the summer just to get away from home. Suddenly there was more to it. Where did I want to be? And why? No one had ever asked me. Unlike most of the people I’d meet that summer, I had never asked myself. But they had. It was a startling difference even from the arty UNC students I knew.

Anni Albers, Knot 2, 1947 (photographed by Tim Nighswander/Imaging 4 Art).

 
By 1955, almost everything material at the school was broken, run down, disintegrating. The single washing machine on campus was marked “fuckt.” Lorraine and Mona, down the hall from my room in a large cottage named Streamside, showed me a “stomp in the bathtub” washing method that was kind of fun and passably effective. Clothing didn’t require a lot of laundry skills. Students wore Mexican shirts, torn jeans, handmade earrings. A foretaste of hippie fashion. Many wore the sandals that one of the art students made, strips of rubber crossing over the top of the foot securing sections of tire tread for soles.

How could a whole world open up for me in such a derelict place?

But it did. Everywhere I was confronted by radical departures from the self-assured liberal world I’d grown up in. In Charles Olson’s reading list. In music theory with Stefan Wolpe and theater with Wes Huss—we did scenes by Lorca and Beckett. In Josef Albers’ color theories, conveyed by a former Albers student, Tony Landreau. Most of all, in constant exchanges among teachers and students—about how nothing is ever truly nothing in art, or poetry, or theater; about giving oneself permission to try anything; about detecting and avoiding the predetermined.

Josef Albers, Tenayuca, 1943 (photographed by Ben Blackwell).

 
I was at BMC only three months. But a practice of “cut to the chase, go for what you really mean, use any means you can enlist to do that”—what my fellow students called “the Black Mountain brainwash”—left me unable to adapt to the rules of conventional education. I remember thinking I’d be involved with Black Mountain ideas for the rest of my life. I wasn’t mistaken.

The exhibition at the Hammer Museum focuses on the college’s formal dates of operation. But, in my experience, the daring that animated BMC continues to leap. There are still some surprises from its last generation awaiting a wider public look. Poets John Wieners and Edward Dorn. Painters Tom Field and Basil King.

Only last year, artists from the indie rock groups Arcade Fire and The National collaborated on a multimedia “Black Mountain Songs” in Brooklyn and London, incorporating poetry, painting, dance, theater, and music animated by Black Mountain’s examples.

What galvanized that small group of misfits and mischief-makers, what required people who stayed at Black Mountain to be alive to the unexpected—this has a life beyond the dates that bracket the College’s existence.

“Onward,” as poet Robert Creeley—a teacher at Black Mountain—put it.

A photograph of the Studies Building at Black Mountain College on a 2014 tour.

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