Presenter
Jenni Sorkin
Abstract
Through original archival research, this presentation posits that the American poet, potter, and translator M.C. Richards (1916-1999) was one of the primary, if as yet unacknowledged, intellectual forces of the burgeoning 1950s queer aesthetic. It explores her unique legacy as the sole woman within her intellectual milieu, first at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and then at the Gate Hill Cooperative, a radical community formed in Stony Point, New York, that she co-founded in 1954, along with other Black Mountain exiles, including Cage, David Tudor, Paul and Vera Williams, Karen Karnes, and David Weinrib.