Highly influential college founded at Black Mountain, North Carolina, USA, in 1933. Its progressive principles were based on the educational theories of John Rice, its founder. In the curriculum, drama, music and fine art were given equal status to all other academic subjects. Teaching was informal and stress was laid on communal living and outdoor activities. Most of the work of running the college and maintaining the buildings was done by students and faculty. Among its first teachers of art was Josef Albers, who had fled Nazi Germany after the closure of the Bauhaus that same year. Black Mountain quickly became an extraordinary powerhouse of modern culture in America. Its board of advisers included Albert Einstein and among its teachers at one time or another were some of the greatest luminaries of modern American culture including the founder of the Bauhaus, the architect Walter Gropius, the Abstract Expressionist painters Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell the composer John Cage and the dancer Merce Cunningham. In 1949 Albers and others left as a result of internal divisions. The College was reconstituted under the poet Charles Olson but eventually closed in 1953. Among its most notable artist students were Kenneth Noland and Robert Rauschenberg.