Like so much of our community in WNC, School of the Alternative was rocked by Hurricane Helene. Extensive damage closed our beloved Blue Ridge Assembly (for now) as they work through extensive repairs, and months were lost from our planning season. But we are holding a session. SotA this May will be different, but we know that it is vital that we nourish the spaces that feed us joy and hope in a time when we are starving for it. We know that in this time when floods rise and fires burn we need spaces of respite. Of care. Of collaboration. Where we can do the critical work of processing what has been. Where we can imagine better worlds.

our annual spring session will be held:
May 17-25, 2025

Faculty Deadline:
Friday, February 21st

student and scholarship deadline:
5pm on Friday, March 21st

This land is forever changed, but it and we are resilient, and this tragedy has illustrated above all else that there is nothing more powerful than community.

We are excited to officially invite you back here in May. To this resilient, beautiful, ancient, scarred and sacred land. Thank you for your patience with our delayed timeline - we are forever adapting to offer this experience to you. Applications are out now!

Learn more about our Spring 2025 session

“SotA gave me the type of community I have wanted and needed for so long. I’ve learned so much about experimental and emergent education during my time in undergraduate and graduate school, and it was incredible to finally have real-life experiences guided by such educational beliefs. This is what education should be everywhere. My time at SotA was transformative in ways I still haven’t found the words for.”

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Art & Education
4.2021

Emergent Utopias: Three Experiments in Alternative Art Education: The Black School, 2727 California Street, and School of the Alternative

by Lauren Stroh

BURNAWAY
6.2019

Art school as an institution seems like one of the most inflexible of all the higher education formats–the pressure on the right programs, the right schools. Have you encountered any disbelief about what alternative education can do to expand that very narrow vision?

For some people who are more heavily steeped in institutions, it’s hard to really place what we are, and they spend a lot of energy trying to slip us into a familiar box.

Asheville Grit
12.2017

Imagine stepping into a discussion about shamanic practices and dreaming. Or picture collaborating on a mural, learning turntablism, or exploring the microverse through fermentation and visualization. Now, picture immersing yourself into these experiences for a full week or more. Sound intriguing? It all exists at the School of the Alternative.

BLACK MOUNTAIN NEWS
5.2017

Tim Kerr was teaching a class in Black Mountain last summer when he noticed that nothing in town noted that Black Mountain College used to be nearby.

“I was kind of amazed,” the Austin-based folk artist and muralist said last week. So last week he and a dozen of his students at the School of the Alternative painted a mural depicting some of the college’s notable faculty on the side of a building on Sutton Avenue.

ARTSY
11.2016

Higher education is in a state of crisis. Student debt is skyrocketing. And those looking for masters degrees pay ever-higher sums to institutions that frequently underpay the very adjunct faculty they employ as teachers. For those in the arts, the question of whether or not an MFA is worth the investment of time and money proves perpetually vexing. Enter the inaugural Alternative Art School Fair (AASF), an initiative of the educational wing of Red Hook, Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works.