The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC), 56 Broadway in downtown Asheville, presents the new exhibition “In Site: Late Works by Irwin Kremen.” There will be an opening reception from 5:30–7:30 p.m. on February 18, and the exhibit will continue through June 4. In addition, there will be a gallery talk by the artist at 11 a.m. on Saturday, February 19. The exhibition will focus primarily on recent works by this master collagist, but will also include a selection of his sculptures.

Kremen had begun working as a reporter and columnist for a local daily newspaper in New York City five months after he had quit studying journalism at Northwestern University when he came across an article featuring Black Mountain College. Without hesitation, he hopped on a train and joined this small, avant-garde community flourishing in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Kremen recalls that he “sought fresh experience, different ideas, expanded feeling, in short, another way to be in the world.”

Although Kremen enrolled in Black Mountain College in 1946 to pursue his aspirations as a young writer, the progressive and collective environment he encountered there permanently redefined his ideas about education. Black Mountain College exposed him to such various and influential artists as poet and potter M.C. Richards and abstract painters Josef Albers and Kenneth Noland. Richards, who became Kremen’s lifelong friend, prompted his first collage experiment nearly 20 years after Kremen left Black Mountain College.

He says about his work, “I hunt out papers that have been in sun, in rain, covered with the dirt of the city. Yet as I look at them, I realize their exquisite potential.”

For additional information, call Alice Sebrell at 828.350.8484. BMCM+AC preserves and continues the unique legacy of educational and artistic innovation of Black Mountain College through collection, conservation, and educational activities and exhibitions.

For additional information, call Alice Sebrell at 828.350.8484. BMCM+AC pre- serves and continues the unique legacy of educational and artistic innovation of Black Mountain College through collection, conservation, and educational activities and exhibitions.