ARCHIVE

Laura Kuhn is joined this week by Ray Kass, founder and director of The Mountain Lake Workshop, an ongoing series of collaborative and interrelated workshops centered in the environmental, cultural, and community resources of the Appalachian region of southwestern Virginia. The Mountain Lake Workshops have resulted in many unique, collaborative works of art that have been widely exhibited, including John Cage’s significant body of watercolors – New River Watercolors, Steps, River Rocks and Smoke, New River Rocks and Washes and New River Rocks and Smoke – produced between 1983 and 1990. Ray studied Cage’s manner of working with chance operations before they began, which helped to lure Cage to Virginia and which greatly facilitated Cage’s work and their time together; conversation this evening speaks to Cage’s methods of working in the visual arts utilizing chance operations, or methods he first developed in his composition of music.

Jade Dellinger, director of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in Fort Myers, Florida, also joins us, as both Jade and Ray have exhibitions opening in Asheville, North Carolina, this year – Ray’s, which is running now at the Asheville Art Museum, is entitled “Rural Avant-Garde: The Mountain Lake Experience,” and Jade’s, which opens in September at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center, is entitled "Don’t Blame It on Zen: The Way of John Cage and Friends." Jade will also perform with Kuhn in a presentation of Cage’s Indeterminacy stories at BMCM + AC during its international conference, ReVIEWING Black Mountain 12, taking place Nov. 12-14, 2021.