Practically every major artistic figure of the mid-twentieth century spent some time at Black Mountain College: Harry Callahan, Merce Cunningham, Walter Gropius, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Aaron Siskind, Cy Twombly--the list goes on and on. Yet scholars have tended to view these artists' time at the college as little more than prologue, a step on their way to greatness. With "The Experimenters," Eva Diaz reveals the influence of Black Mountain College--and especially of three key instructors, Josef Albers, John Cage, and R. Buckminster Fuller--to be much greater than that.
Diaz's focus is on experimentation. Albers, Cage, and Fuller, she shows, taught new models of art making that favored testing procedures rather than personal expression. The resulting projects not only reconfigured the relationships among chance, order, and design--they helped redefine what artistic practice was, and could be, for future generations.
Offering a bold, compelling new angle on some of the most widely studied creative minds of the twentieth century, "The Experimenters" does nothing less than rewrite the story of art in the mid-twentieth century.

Social inequality, population growth, climate change. The artist Dawn DeDeaux does not shy away from difficult topics. Since the 1970s, she has been probing humanity's present and future in videos, performances, and installations. This catalogue, published to coincide with her first comprehensive museum exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art, presents DeDeaux's work spanning five decades: from early multimedia works using radio and satellite to recent works from her MotherShip series, in which she imagines humanity's escape from a destroyed Earth. In her work, art is always closely intertwined with philosophy, science, and new technologies. Consequently, the text contributions go beyond art to contextualize her work.