BMC was a liberal arts college, not an art school - a common misconception. Its radical vision was that the practice of the arts by all students, whatever their future careers, was a central part of the liberal arts experience. Exploring an art form - whether the visual arts, music, literature, drama, or dance - was valuable in learning self-discipline and self-expression.

Josef Albers, a dominant figure for the first 16 years of the College, and his wife Anni, brought to BMC their experience at the German Bauhaus school of art and design. Albers taught art as process - not product - and his oft-stated goal was "to open eyes." In the later years of the College the prevailing creative force was the poet Charles Olson. Albers and Olson were magnets to other artists who came both as faculty and students. They generated a critical mass of creative people in many different fields, which was the catalyst for experimentation and innovation.

The most intense periods of creativity came in the Summer Institutes, held annually beginning in 1944. The concentrated sessions brought together as faculty and students many of the most talented musicians, dancers, painters, photographers, visual artists, thinkers and educators of the 20th century. The result was the College's trade - mark combination of high achievement and fearless experimentation.

ON ARTS

Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition. Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance - how it is done - that is the content of art.
- Josef Albers

[John Andrew Rice, BMC's founder] knew that the human mind has more than one mode, that indeed it has an "ecology" of being. He knew that imagination, intuition, inspiration are basic to psyche. . . . A philosophy of education began to form: imagination as fundamental to all learning; artistic making as a model of integrating vision, materials, structure, and imagery.
- M.C. Richards, Faculty 1945-51

Albers, in our classes, asked us to look at what man had made, not selectively or chronologically but widely. We looked at pottery designs, bridges, tools, buildings, paintings, at how things went together, at how things grew. It was exciting. He asked us to figure out what made each idea work. He asked us to look and look but, in looking, to trust and to use our own perceptions creatively and neatly.
- Mary Gregory, Faculty 1941-47

. . . it really became kind of recognized [at BMC] that art could be anything, and could be made out of anything, and that it didn't necessarily cross boundaries -- they thought - between theater, the visual arts, dance, music, etc., that you could mix all this up and make a multi-media - or . . . environmental art.
- Kenneth Noland, Student 1946-48, 1950 Summer Session

The lectures Olson delivered in his writing workshops were equally iconoclastic and antilinear, random shards of culture as purged of any historical coherence as the elements of John Cage's Happenings. . . . His classes averaged four hours and could last six or eight, and sitting through them was like seeing an archaeologist throw a tantrum in a richly endowed museum.
- Francine du Plessix Gray, Student 1951 and 1952 Summer Sessions