Josef Albers on Frank Lloyd Wright

A note by Bauhaus artist Josef Albers (who later taught at Black Mountain College and Yale) in which he recalls an encounter with Frank Lloyd Wright in 1938, as quoted by Nicholas Fox Weber in Achim Borcardt-Hume, ed., Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 109—

I remember when the Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened: very late. 11 or 12 when all were gone except a few from the Bauhaus. [Walter] Gropius, [Herbert] Bayer, Anni [Albers], me. Appeared Frank Lloyd Wright. In a Havelock [a cloth attached to the back of the hat, to protect ones neck from sunburn] and Wagnerian velvet cap (with a challenging older lady) telling us very loud, "You are all wrong." And who was it later saying: "Frank Lloyd Wright?—he is always frank, and not always right."

See also: Roy R. Behrens, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016).   

No Poems in the Hopper

From Lyman Gilmore's biography of poet Joel Oppenheimer, Don't Touch the Poet: The Life and Times of Joel Oppenheimer (Jersey City NJ: Talisman Press, 1998), p. 58—

[At Black Mountain College in the early 1950s, American poet Charles] Olson's methods of teaching were unique…He would lecture passionately and endlessly about a great variety of seemingly disconnected techniques—Mayan glyphs, the American Federalist period, Leo Frobenius, Homer's Odyssey—while his students struggled to keep pace and make sense of the performance. Olson had a basket on his desk into which students were supposed to deposit their poetry for criticism and class discussion, but sometimes he would ignore the basket for weeks "while class after class went on about physics or mathematics or anthropology or whatever Charles was interested in at the time." Then one day he would notice that nobody was submitting any writing he he'd say, "There are no poems in the hopper, and there better be some before the next morning."

Ballast Reviews | Them

Them: A Memoir of Parents by Francine du Plessix Gray. New York: Penguin Press, 2005. 530 pp., with 92 b&w illustrations. Clothbound. ISBN 0-59420-049-1.

…I have often run across the name of this book's author (so colorful who could forget it), a frequent New Yorker contributor who was also once a student at Black Mountain College, at a time when others at that school included Robert Rauschenberg (with whom she played strip poker), Merce Cunningham, and John Cage. More…