Bernard "Bernie" Karp
Black Mountain College students near Old Fort, February 1948. Courtesy of Western Regional Archives
FOCUS
General Studies
ROLE
Student
ATTENDANCE
1947 - 1949
BIRTH
1928-02-08
Philadelphia, PA
DEATH
2018-10-13
Bernard Karp was a student from 1947 to 1949. While a student, he served as a student officer and participated in community council.
Bernard's obituary shares that he served in the Army for seven years. He graduated from Earlham College with a degree in geology and worked in the petroleum and natural gas industry, finishing his career with 30 years at Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Asheville Art Museum Collection
Writings about Bernard can be seen in digitized college bulletins on Asheville Art Museum's collection website: collection.ashevilleart.org. They can be found by searching these accession numbers:
2017.40.047 November 1949 bulletin,
"BMC has been invited to submit photographs for the winter issue of Everyday Art Quarterly, published by The Walker Museum in Minneapolis… Bernie Karp is back and is taking care of the wood shop for his work program… New porches (built of BMC cut lumber) are going on South Lodge and Roadside… The “Marshall Field” bull has been sold, and our cows are now being artificially inseminated."
Author
Amanda Hartman
Amanda Hartman is the creator of BMC Yearbook, serving as the lead director, engineer, and researcher. She holds a MLIS in archive/ collections management, MA in art/ museum education, and BA in design. After working in museums and archives for a decade, she made the transition to tech and is now a software developer specializing in applications for museums, archives, and higher education.
Her interest in Black Mountain College began while working as a digital archivist with the Asheville Art Museum's BMC archive collection. She transcribed and digitized over 1500 documents created by the college. While working closely with these archives, she began independent research on the interracial program and Negro Week activities BMC, writing biographies of lesser known students and staff members. That research transformed into this BMC Yearbook project.
