{RE}HAPPENING Celebrates 12 Years at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

Since 2010, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC) has hosted the {Re}HAPPENING inspired by John Cage’s 1952 Theatre Piece No. 1, an unscripted performance at Black Mountain College considered by many to be the first Happening. The annual {Re}HAPPENING brings together dozens of contemporary artists whose work responds to and extends the legacy of Black Mountain College visionaries such as John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Anni Albers, M.C. Richards, Ruth Asawa, Buckminster Fuller, Josef Albers, and Robert Rauschenberg. 

The 2024 {Re}HAPPENING celebrates the event’s 12th anniversary, featuring a host of artists presenting work throughout the Lake Eden campus. Visitors will encounter an immersive collection of projects in the tradition of BMC—installation, sound, movement, visual art, and interactive media.

Michelle Yi Martin presents an installation of woven sculptures entitled Threshold Gods. Martin’s large-scale sculptures, made of monofilament, horsehair, and jute, will be suspended midair. The ethereal, amorphous forms present as beings in a transformative state – just at the threshold of life. Martin is a multi-disciplinary artist based in San Francisco. She has been a humanities educator for over two decades, weaving together history, literature, and the arts with her students. Her sculptures for the {Re}HAPPENING will recall the innovative sculptural work of BMC student Ruth Asawa, as well as the artist Kay Sekimachi.

Drones in the Garden, founded by Sophie F. Hull (Sleep Number), Patrick Kukucka (Falcon Mitts), and Lynn Fister (Farewell Phoenix), will create an all-day immersive botanical installation entitled The Abandoned Garden Structures. Pyramidal structures covered with vegetation will serve as platforms for three experimental music performances interspersed with spoken word and poetry readings. 

Choreographer, musician, and scholar Eric Mullis presents Technogenesis, an experimental dance trio inspired by Merce Cunningham and John Cage that merges aleatory techniques and digital software platforms to create unconventional choreography. 

The {Re}HAPPENING will also feature all-day installations including a large-scale immersive performance sculpture installation by Cilla Vee Life Arts; an audio-visual projection tunnel by Geo Lynx; an installation exploring the relationship between music and textiles by Qianwen Yu; an interactive, animated bog ecosystem by Victoria Bradbury; a spatialized multi-channel immersive audio experience by Christopher Hamilton; a solar-powered sound collage by Matt Allison; a multi-media event with historical footage and live sound mixing by Matt Greenwell and Ron Buffington; and a prismatic playground by Swannatopia, 10-year veterans of the event.

Interdisciplinary performances will include an experimental fantasy operetta by Majid Araim; a layering of bodies, projections, fabric, and sound by Caitlyn Schrader, Sean Mulachy, and Bjorn Bates; a participatory gathering of clay, movement, and improvisational sound by Kiran Jandu and Michael Medeiros; a nomadic dance journey by Julie Becton Gillum; a three-phased interdisciplinary happening by the Chicago-based Sound Performance Land Collective; a 4-6 hour reading performed at a distance by Justin William Evans; an improvisatory music and dance exchange with a plant by Lindsey Jones and Allen Fogelsanger; a multi-channel video performance based on Xanti Schawinsky's Spectodrama by Miles Lamberson; a workshop, film,  and performance with salvaged plastic by Tom Hansell, Trevor McKenzie, and Julie Shepherd-Powell; and an aria for the elements by experimental vocalists Alisha Erao (Lush Agave)and Elisa Faires. 

Sound-based projects will also include a cello performance inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s "Erased de Kooning Drawing" by John Popham; harmonic and polyrhythmic performances with invented instruments by Spiral Garden; a new collaborative performance by filmmaker Madison Brookshire and composer Laura Steenberge; a concrete compositional experiment between poet Rachel Allen and sculptor Nathan Carter; and a presentation of little-known works by the 20th century composer Netty Simons, performed and organized by Zach Aliotta. 

Other participatory and family-friendly sessions will include a collaborative bookmaking workshop with artists from Local Cloth; a chance to build Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic structures with Michael Webster; and a meditative music gardening circle with Sarah Louise.

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