The Book Project

Mark Davenport’s forthcoming illustrated history, Community, Art, Education, and the Quest for Meaning: From Black Mountain College to the Gate Hill Cooperative (begun in 2013) tells the largely untold story of the Gate Hill Cooperative, an intentional community founded in 1954 by an extraordinary group of Black Mountain College faculty and students. Envisioning a rural environment where their lives could be more intimately connected to nature, community and art, the group replanted themselves on the side of a densely wooded mountain, 30 miles north of Manhattan above the towns of Stony Point and Haverstraw. There they built their artist’s village of homes and studios (affectionately known to its members as “The Land”), where for a brief time this imaginative social experiment became one of the most active and progressive communities in contemporary art and living.