Beauty and the Beast (Francine du Plessix Gray and Joel Oppenheimer), 1951. A few weeks ago nearly a hundred academics, artists, educators and critics descended upon the University of North Carolina’s Asheville campus for an on-site conference examining the legacy of Black Mountain College, the first since the institution’s closure in 1957. Founded in 1933 by a group of academics and students eager to practice theories of progressive education, Black Mountain College held the arts and cr