Women of Black Mountain College Film Screenings

Three films have been grouped for this special screening centering on women who attended Black Mountain College. Two of the films—M.C. Richards: The Fire Within and Josef and Anni Albers: Art Is Everywhere—have been screened here before. (Reviews for both can be found on the Xpress movie archives online at www.mountainx.com/movies.) Added to the mix this round is Robert Snyder’s film Ruth Asawa: Of Forms & Growth, which looks at the art and life of the San Francisco artist who attended Black Mountain College from 1946 through 1949. Asawa’s work—primarily wire sculpture—was much influenced by her time at the school. Her artistic credo was: “If you plant a seed in the ground, the seed doesn’t say, well, in eight hours I’m going to stop growing. You put it in the ground and that bulb grows every second that it’s attached to the earth. That’s why I think that every minute we’re attached to the earth, we should be doing something”—which explains her outlook on both life and art, and offers Snyder plenty of opportunities to give us a rounded portrait of Asawa.