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.

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!

Pictured left: Photo of Jade Dellinger (2020) by Brian Tietz.
Pictured right: Photo of Ray Kass (2018) by David Franusich, Courtesy Moss Center for the Arts.