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The legacy of Black Mountain College (BMC) lives on through the work of the well-known artists and performers who studied and taught there during its 23-year history. Architectural Historian Katie Horak and Dominika Tylcz, curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, examine the lives of two women artists who studied at BMC during the 1940s, the unique circumstances that brought them there, and the paths they would chart as productive, working artists.

Jane Slater Marquis came to BMC in 1940 from Ogden, Utah, with a desire to study creative writing and poetry. Her coursework with Josef Albers inspired her to change course, graduating in 1945 with a degree in art. Marquis relocated to Los Angeles, married a fellow BMC student, and started a 70-year career as a working artist, first in graphic design and ultimately in stained glass. Marquis produced hundreds of stained-glass panels, ranging from small residential work to major commissions with notable architects, including Charles Moore.

In 1946, Ruth Asawa came to BMC from Milwaukee, where she had spent four years studying to become an art teacher, a plan that never came to fruition due to the anti-Japanese sentiment in post-war Wisconsin. At BMC, the inspiring presence of practicing artists shaped her decision to become an artist herself. In Josef Albers's classes, Asawa came across ideas and methods that would occupy her for the rest of her six-decade-long career. In 1949 she relocated to San Francisco, married a fellow BMC student, and built a life centered around the practice and promotion of the arts. Her multidisciplinary practice challenges the distinctions between fine art, craft, and design, as seen in the story of her earliest prints executed at Black Mountain.