Panel text reads:
I went to college in North Carolina for one reason, and that was to meet Thomas Wolfe. Not that I expected to see him coming around a corner, with a massive frame, curly brown hair and caldron eyes burning. I merely wished to be in a territory where he might have been, and it would seem he still was there. By sheer chance, the college that elicited my interest has since become one of the most famous and notorious in the world of education. Black Mountain College is called now, by some, a first center of counterculture, an original American "commune" and ingroup proving ground of the new anti-art, anti-traditionalist youth movement.
For myself in retrospect it was none of these. Or, not in those words. And when I was of student age, in that society the impulse toward social improvement (as well as self-alteration) was deemed more natural than political. Educationally speaking, I can see that Black Mountain was rather like a backwoods version of Oxford, with tutorial courses and emphasis on the individual, and with the greatest freedom for independent choices in study and curriculum. But more, and in terms of no less importance, the college was located in one of the most beautiful places in the world. Nature, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the dogwood and sumac reddening in the autumn and the quiet urgency of wind and water-there was a stream beside the dormitory building that bubbled over a rockbed like a host of Homeric voices, never ceasing night and day—all these constituted a presence, a living presence just beyond one's field of consciousness, and richly always there in waking life and dreams.
Jane Mayhall
From "The Death of Thomas Wolfe," The Southern Review, October 1982.
I went to college in North Carolina for one reason, and that was to meet Thomas Wolfe. Not that I expected to see him coming around a corner, with a massive frame, curly brown hair and caldron eyes burning. I merely wished to be in a territory where he might have been, and it would seem he still was there. By sheer chance, the college that elicited my interest has since become one of the most famous and notorious in the world of education. Black Mountain College is called now, by some, a first center of counterculture, an original American "commune" and ingroup proving ground of the new anti-art, anti-traditionalist youth movement.
For myself in retrospect it was none of these. Or, not in those words. And when I was of student age, in that society the impulse toward social improvement (as well as self-alteration) was deemed more natural than political. Educationally speaking, I can see that Black Mountain was rather like a backwoods version of Oxford, with tutorial courses and emphasis on the individual, and with the greatest freedom for independent choices in study and curriculum. But more, and in terms of no less importance, the college was located in one of the most beautiful places in the world. Nature, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the dogwood and sumac reddening in the autumn and the quiet urgency of wind and water-there was a stream beside the dormitory building that bubbled over a rockbed like a host of Homeric voices, never ceasing night and day—all these constituted a presence, a living presence just beyond one's field of consciousness, and richly always there in waking life and dreams.
Jane Mayhall
From "The Death of Thomas Wolfe," The Southern Review, October 1982.
Artwork: 1995.33.1
I went to college in North Carolina for one reason, and that was to meet Thomas Wolfe in The South Review
This work was created for the 1995 exhibition Remembering Black Mountain College curated by Mary Emma Harris in conjunction with Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and the BMC alumni reunion organized by Mary Holden Thompson, founding director of BMCM+AC.
24 x 18 inches
In copyright
GIft of Jane Mayhall
Jane Mayhall, I went to college in North Carolina for one reason, and that to meet Thomas Wolfe in The South Review, 1995. Printed paper on foam board. Collection of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Gift of the artist.
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