SotA aims to provide a learning space that is equitable and caring and radical in response to a world that is not.

Our 2025 Session will be held May 10-18

We will open applications in late October

Every May we build and sustain a community of experimental learning where artists learn, work, and live communally in Black Mountain, NC, on the historic first site of Black Mountain College. Faculty, staff, and students live communally in one lodge, and we all help sustain the community through some kind of work service. Instead of a traditional classroom environment, we support a collectively built and self-directed approach to learning which gives opportunity for all participants to learn and teach, where faculty and staff attend classes, and students teach pop-up classes.

Much of SotA’s shape and pace has formed in relief of the restrictive and oppressive tendencies we’ve all experienced in institutional learning, and we create a different kind of experience. We are hosting a community that aims to be equitable and safe(r) for those most marginalized in institutional learning spaces. We work to foster a community free of traditional hierarchies, where we can collectively nurture our imaginations, and learn, teach, and grow together.

“SotA gave me the type of community I have wanted and needed for so long. I’ve learned so much about experimental and emergent education during my time in undergraduate and graduate school, and it was incredible to finally have real-life experiences guided by such educational beliefs. This is what education should be everywhere. My time at SotA was transformative in ways I still haven’t found the words for.”

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Art & Education
4.2021

Emergent Utopias: Three Experiments in Alternative Art Education: The Black School, 2727 California Street, and School of the Alternative

by Lauren Stroh

BURNAWAY
6.2019

Art school as an institution seems like one of the most inflexible of all the higher education formats–the pressure on the right programs, the right schools. Have you encountered any disbelief about what alternative education can do to expand that very narrow vision?

For some people who are more heavily steeped in institutions, it’s hard to really place what we are, and they spend a lot of energy trying to slip us into a familiar box.

Asheville Grit
12.2017

Imagine stepping into a discussion about shamanic practices and dreaming. Or picture collaborating on a mural, learning turntablism, or exploring the microverse through fermentation and visualization. Now, picture immersing yourself into these experiences for a full week or more. Sound intriguing? It all exists at the School of the Alternative.

BLACK MOUNTAIN NEWS
5.2017

Tim Kerr was teaching a class in Black Mountain last summer when he noticed that nothing in town noted that Black Mountain College used to be nearby.

“I was kind of amazed,” the Austin-based folk artist and muralist said last week. So last week he and a dozen of his students at the School of the Alternative painted a mural depicting some of the college’s notable faculty on the side of a building on Sutton Avenue.

ARTSY
11.2016

Higher education is in a state of crisis. Student debt is skyrocketing. And those looking for masters degrees pay ever-higher sums to institutions that frequently underpay the very adjunct faculty they employ as teachers. For those in the arts, the question of whether or not an MFA is worth the investment of time and money proves perpetually vexing. Enter the inaugural Alternative Art School Fair (AASF), an initiative of the educational wing of Red Hook, Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works.