From 1933 to 1956, Black Mountain College, the influential yet short-lived communal art school in North Carolina, attracted the likes of Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Buckminster Fuller. Previous books tend to be preoccupied with these inhabitants, but this book tells a different story.

The college needed food. The Depression and World War II made self-sufficiency essential. Students and faculty worked the land. They milked cows, grew vegetables, and raised livestock. The farm supplied this creative community. But the farm served another purpose. It tested ideas about community living and collaboration. Here, intellectual rigor overlapped with hard labor. Students who studied poetry in the morning harvested apples in the afternoon. Faculty who taught art mucked out pens.

The farm shaped Black Mountain College perhaps more than any curriculum. It provided food when money ran short, offered practical training in community building, and grounded lofty ideals in the land, animal husbandry, and rural economies. These student-farmers built something remarkable. This book reveals the college's success and its inevitable downfall.

Written by David Silver, First Edition, 224 pages, Published by Atelier Editions