Basil King is a poet and a prolific visual artist who was a student at Black Mountain College. He often explains his art by saying: “from the abstract to the figure, from the figure to the abstract makes an edge of exquisite distance and distance gives us our sensations.” Today he goes back and forth between painting and writing, on two different floors of his house in Brooklyn, which he shares with his wife Martha King, also a fellow BMC student.

There will be four exhibitions opening at the Turchin Center: “Creative Democracy: The Legacy of Black Mountain College,” “High Country Herbarium: Preserving Plants & Plant Communities in the Southern Appalachians,” “Department of Art Faculty Biennial,” “The 15th Annual Appalachian Mountain Photography Competition & Exhibition” and “Pieces of the Puzzle: Turchin Outreach Programs.”

David Silver is an associate professor of environmental studies and urban agriculture at the University of San Francisco, where he teaches classes on food, culture, and storytelling. For the last five years, he has been researching and writing a multimedia history of the farm at Black Mountain College. During the summers of 2014 and 2015, Silver was scholar-in-residence at Hunt Library at North Carolina State University, where he worked with NCSU’s library and IT staff to design multiple video walls to accompany his talks about the farm at Black Mountain College.

Anne Waldman, internationally recognized and acclaimed poet, is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. She is the author of more than 40 books. She will give a reading of her work and talk about the broad influence of BMC on poetics, as well as her relationship with legendary BMC poet and the College’s last rector, Charles Olson. As part of the Hughlene Bostian Frank Visiting Writers Series, a Craft Talk “The Creative Rhizome: Generative Practices in Art & Life” will take place at 3:30 p.m. in the Table Rock Room, Plemmons Student Union at Appalachian preceding her evening lecture at the same location at 7:30 p.m.

Julie Thomson is an independent scholar and curator who lives in Durham, North Carolina. She has been researching and writing about the Black Mountain College artist, Ray Johnson since 2006 and photographers who were at Black Mountain College since 2015. In 2017 she curated the exhibition, “Begin to See: The Photographers of Black Mountain College” at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Her writing has appeared in Black Mountain College Studies and Raw Vision. She has an M.A. in Art History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was a Critical Studies Fellow in the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 2010-2011.