Women of Black Mountain College | Karen Karnes and MC Richards

“Are you gonna be an earthy person, practical, bound to earth, or are you going to be a dreamer, a visionary? I don’t have to choose. I am both, and I live in the crossing point.”

– MC Richards

The words of poet and potter MC Richards (1916-1999) go to the heart of the ethos at Black Mountain College, and chime with the stories of so many of those who spent time there. Working with words as she did with clay, she was both practical and visionary.

She and her friend Karen Karnes (1925-2016), who came to Black Mountain in 1952 to lead the first Pottery Seminar, and later ran the college Pot Shop, joined Vera Williams and others to form Gate Hill Cooperative in 1954. Check out last week’s post on Vera Williams for more on that story. The Land, as it was known by its residents, is often seen as an extension of Black Mountain College, and a living experiment in life at that crossing point between materials and imaginative vision.

Richards joined the faculty at Black Mountain in 1945, teaching, producing plays, dancing and studying pottery. She founded The Black Mountain Review. Karnes and her husband David Weinrib arrived in 1952 as potters-in-residence. Under their leadership, the college Pot Shop hosted some of the most influential potters of the 20th century, including Shoji Hamada, Bernard Leach, and Bauhaus potter Marguerite Wildenhain. Unlike her husband, and despite her contribution to these extraordinary exchanges between artists from around the world, Karnes was offered neither a title nor payment from the college.

At Gate Hill, Karnes built her own studio and kilns, and worked with Richards and a local ceramics engineer to develop and popularise a form of flame-proof clay, that made it possible to make ceramic cookware. Karnes produced oven-top casserole dishes for over fifty years, later also making larger, more abstract works. In the early 1970s, separated from Weinrib since 1956, Karnes met British artist Ann Stannard, who would become her lifelong partner. The couple moved to rural Vermont in 1979, where Karnes built a kiln and established a studio practice.

Follow our #WomenOfBMC series to discover some of Black Mountain’s pioneering women.

Banner image: Karen Karnes in the pottery workshop at Black Mountain College, 1952. Photograph by Edward Dupuy. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.