Guided tour at the former Black Mountain College campus
Event: OCC.0296
ReVIEWING 13: Leo Amino / The Visible and the Invisible: Submerged Histories of Abstraction
October 7 – 9, 2022
The 13th Annual ReVIEWING Black Mountain College conference had a thematic focus on Black Mountain College faculty member and pioneering Japanese American sculptor Leo Amino. In conjunction with the conference, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center presented the exhibition Leo Amino: Work with Material, curated by Genji Amino, Director of The Estate of Leo Amino. This exhibition demonstrated Amino’s ingenuity in working with new materials to investigate the dynamics of perception through material and phenomenal transparency. In particular, the exhibition will highlight his groundbreaking experiments with polyester resin beginning in the mid-1940s following the material’s declassification by the military after the Second World War. Amino is the innovator of cast plastics in the history of American sculpture, and the first artist in the United States to create a full body of work in the medium.
The conference aimed to reconstruct submerged histories of experimental practice in 20th century American art during the years of operation of Black Mountain College: 1933-1957. With an emphasis on the legacy of Black Mountain for artists of color and members of other marginalized groups, the conference interrogated the omissions and orthodoxies of prevailing narratives that have limited the ways we write about the relationship between race, gender, experiment, and abstraction in the 20th century.
The conference aimed to reconstruct submerged histories of experimental practice in 20th century American art during the years of operation of Black Mountain College: 1933-1957. With an emphasis on the legacy of Black Mountain for artists of color and members of other marginalized groups, the conference interrogated the omissions and orthodoxies of prevailing narratives that have limited the ways we write about the relationship between race, gender, experiment, and abstraction in the 20th century.
University of North Carolina Asheville