This week Laura Kuhn talks with Ray Kass, Professor Emeritus of Art at Virginia Tech and founding director of The Mountain Lake Workshop, an ongoing series of collaborative and inter-related workshops centered in the environmental, cultural, and community resources of the Appalachian region of southwestern Virginia. These workshops have resulted in unique, collaborative works that have been widely exhibited. Artists who have completed workshops at Mountain Lake have included, in addition to John Cage, Howard Finster, Jiro Okura, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, M.C. Richards, Lynne Hull, James De La Vega, Stephen Addiss, and Jackie Matisse. And, of course, Ray Kass himself.

John Cage created 125 signed watercolors during four week-long sessions at The Mountain Lake Workshop between 1983 and 1991, all of which are reproduced in The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors, published by Ray Kass in 2011. During Cage’s Centennial Year, 2012, Kass mounted a beautiful eponymous exhibition of Cage’s watercolors at the National Academy Museum in New York, for which the book served as its accompanying catalog.

Kass was a close friend and associate to both John Cage and the Pacific Northwest artist Morris Graves, who Cage had befriended during his years at the Cornish School in Seattle in the 1930s. He is therefore the perfect person with which to converse on the subject of Morris Graves, as well as Cage’s text piece, Series re Morris Graves (1973), which we began to listen to last week on “All Things Cage,” and will continue this week. We’ll dive right into Kuhn’s conversation with Kass, then continue on with Cage’s Series re Morris Graves. Enjoy!

"All Things Cage" is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!

Photo: Courtesy The John Cage Trust. ©Peter Lau