This month, we’re fundraising $8,000
to make our next session possible.

School of the Alternative is an artist residency and collaborative learning space that holds an annual session in Black Mountain, North Carolina. SotA is a place where we can nurture our imaginations, where learning is reciprocal and knowledge is a shared resource. Nurturing such communities turns our eyes towards each other - and away from the systems that thrive on our disconnection. SotA is more than an artist residency; it’s a living model of mutual care, shared knowledge, and creative liberation that offers a glimpse of what’s possible.

Your donation funds scholarships and operational costs and stipends for creative labor and the kind of radical experimentation and organizing that we need to creatively redirect the chaos around us towards the grounded, nurturing, and sustainable

With your support, in the spring of 2026, SotA's 9th session will host 8 radical interdisciplinary art faculty, 35 students, and 10 staff who support the kitchen, garden, and general care. We have roles, but all of us teach; all of us cook and clean; all of us lead in a community that is imaginative, open, caring, and adaptive.

We need your help to sustain this radical, life-affirming space.

Support our fundraiser today

“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.