John Andrew Rice recruited Josef Albers to be the head of the art department at Black Mountain. Already an established artist in his native Germany, Albers had been an instructor at the Bauhaus school, which shared many of the ideals Black Mountain College hoped to promote. The timing of this invitation was especially opportune, as the Nazis had just closed the Bauhaus school and the political situation in Germany was rapidly becoming untenable for artists. Albers arrived in the U.S. speaking almost no English but did not let that stand in his way. As a student of his once said of his teaching, “language played only a minor role… doing is what counted.”
Albers was a tireless promoter of the college and traveled extensively to give lectures on the work being done there and the theories behind it. Some of the coursework he created for the school was later developed into his landmark 1963 color study, “Interaction of Color.” He also designed the school’s boldly modern logo, a simple ring with the name and location of the school. Albers’ modernist philosophy sought to dispense with slavish adherence to esoteric symbols from far flung history and replace them with elegant regard for function. As he explained of the schools iconic logo, “And that no one may puzzle over cryptic monograms, we give our full address.”