Elizabeth “Betty” Schmitt Jennerjahn came to the college for the 1944 art institute and continued on as a student until 1945, and returned from 1948 to 1951 as a student teacher.

BMC Years

Betty first attended the State of Wisconsin state teachers college and shared in her application to BMC that she wanted to attend multiple schools and have multiple perspectives, which she continued to do after leaving BMC. Her student file shares that she took regular trips to New Mexico to visit her boyfriend, which was a concern that was shared by her parents and faculty.

Betty’s family ran a well-known stained glass studio, Conrad Schmitt Studios which is still in operation (conradschmitt.com/studio-history). She originally came to Black Mountain to study stained glass, but was drawn to many mediums of art after working with Josef Albers, and was always drawn to dance. Her brother, Conrad, and sister, Elaine, also attended the college after she began. She left shortly after joining to pursue dance lessons with Martha Graham in New York and applied for readmission after marrying artist Warren “Pete” Jennerjahn, for the summer of 1948 as a student teacher. She shared that in her time away, she worked as a draftsman and assistant commercial artists for Electronic Industries mag; taught modern dance classes at her two previously attended schools; designed and built costumes for sets for Milwaukee musicals; and worked in her father’s stained glass studio.

There is a chapter from Betty in Mervin Lane’s Sprouted Seeds where she wrote of her experience at Black Mountain College. “Yes, the living experience was part of what the education at BMC was all about, and the times were rare, unique. The absolutely best dancing that I remember was waltz nights, those Saturday nights with Fritz Cohen using his powerful hands to produce the Viennese waltzes that got us swirling in the air in our elegant long gowns which we made of dyed flower sacks. After a lifetime of experiences, that stands in my memory as the most elegant social event, with elegant gentlemen like Ted Dreier and Alex Reed wearing jeans and cashmere sweaters and Harris tweed jackets. That was long before such things were worn in the rest of the world, and it just made my eyes pop. (p.130)”

In this account, she also speaks about the Light Sound Movement workshops, which are described by many Black Mountain scholars as an important link between the college’s early Bauhaus-influenced multimedia theater experiments and the historic Happening of 1952. Betty also taught a dance course on Eurhythmics called “Movement and its Rhythmic Structure” and her husband Pete studied and taught art. Betty also worked closely with Merce Cunningham while at BMC and speaks of him and his work often in her letters home (see Jennerjahn collection). She attributed her love for dance, and her gained technique, to Merce Cunningham and Katherine Litz.

Art, Dance, and Teaching Careers

Betty became a well-known dancer and textile artist. The Johnson collection (www.thejohnsoncollection.org) shares her later years after BMC, “​​Wishing to have more time to themselves, the Jennerjahns left Black Mountain in 1951 and spent a year in France. Upon their return, they settled in New York, where Betty taught art and eventually chaired the art department at the Long Island Waldorf School in Garden City. In the late 1980s, the couple moved to Oak Creek, a community close to Sedona, Arizona. In her later years, Jennerjahn pursued textile design and painting.” She danced professionally for years before having her first child, Hans. She took up sewing and textile wall hangings which she created for decades.

In the 1960’s Jennerjahn moved to Long Island for Pete’s appointment to Adelphi College. Western Regional Archives has a collection of newspaper clippings from her time there. An article from “Paging Women” from May 2, 1962 shares “The Jennerjahns’ white house at 120 Brixton Rd. has five studios, including two in the basement… the master bedroom has been converted into a studio for Mr. Jennerjahn’s painting and drawing; he works in stained glass in a room over the garage.” Her two small children also had studios and their kitchen was described as an art gallery of their children’s work. In July of 1962, Betty’s sewn table linens were featured in Woman’s Day magazine. In 1963, she exhibited in a solo exhibition at Adelphi College, where she and her husband were then both art professors.

There are dozens more exhibition announcements in the Jennerjahn collection, including her work in watercolor painting throughout the 1980’s and into the late 2000’s. Also in this collection, are correspondences between Betty and her family during her time at BMC and afterwards.

Betty taught art for much of her life, at Waldorf Institute from 1966 to 1979, Waldorf School from 1967-1979, Penland School of Craft in the summer of 1966, Cleveland Museum of Art in 1953, 1954, and 1965, and at Black Mountain College from 1948 to 1951. Course notes and syllabi for the Waldorf School are also in the Jennerjahn collection, along with sketches and school announcements. There is also a file on one-time projects, like a mural project that she worked on for a military ship, painting scenes in the Infant’s Nursery.

Artist Statement from 11/85

“My work is not a statement for or against something or anything. Each painting is a new creation and stands on its own, as a tree or rock does. It may evoke an indigo bunting, a coyote, a flowering autumn olive, using color as the primary expressive artistic tool. As I am not concerned with comment about a flowering autumn olive, or intellectual information about it, I do not start with form. Through color, the almost inexpressible, dizzying, vibrating cosmos of jasminelike aroma, glow of thousands of white, cream, bone, warm and cool yellow blossoms, and buzz of hundreds of yellow and black butterflies and huge, heavy looking black and orange bumblebees can be created anew. Eventually, of course, these colors inhabit a form. Likewise the coyote who passed by my Adirondack studio one rainy morning, moving steadily on his way to my neighbor’s sheep, was in his own wild world, completely unaware of me behind my glass doors. As his spectral form moved, his colors changed and camouflaged with the warm brown pineneedles and green-grey reindeer lichen. I recreated him immediately out of the color experience, and yet I wondered later whether I had imagined something. Later I examined some coyote pelts in a taxidermist’s shop and saw that the colors and patterns changed constantly as one moved the pelt. Sometimes the tawny undercoat was revealed and sometimes it was hidden as it played in and out with the grey and black of the outer coat. So my initial color impression was correct even though it didn’t seem to make sense at the time. Color can so naturally express the paradoxes in truth.

Through my early years of working with Albers, and later years with Goethe’s color theory, I take it as given that color is the most relative medium in art, and that also each color can have its own activity, (moving in, moving out, standing firm,) all this affected by it’s neighboring colors and the quantity of each. And through this superior vehicle of deep inner soul experience and expression, I as a single human being, use my particular personality to be a direct testimony to the wonder, the fun, the mystery, the beauty, the glory, of life in this God-created world.”

Alternative names: Attended BMC first as a student under Elizabeth "Betty" Schmitt.

Relationships

Husband: Fellow BMC student, Warren Jennerjahn

Sister: Elaine Schmitt

Brother: Victor Schmitt

Brother: Rupert Schmitt

Black Mountain College Project

Mary Emma Harris interviewed Elizabeth and Pete in 1997 (transcript) and 2002 (transcript) which are available from Appalachian State University under The Mary Emma Harris and Black Mountain College Project, Inc. Oral History collection.

Topics 1997: Ray Johnson - Elaine Schmitt Urbain television show – meeting Ray at 1945 summer session – Johnson at BMC – Johnson post-BMC – Johnson Long Island exhibition

Topics 2002: Weaving study with Anni Albers and Trude Guermonprez – discussion of Jennerjahn's BMC weavings and textiles – Pre-Columbian influence at BMC – Harriett Engelhardt Collection – discussion of watercolors from Josef Albers painting class – Ruth Asawa laundry stamp prints – post-BMC fabric collages

Courses Taken

Summer 1944: Art Theory with Ozenfant, Textile Design with A. Albers, Drawing and Painting with J. Charlot, Clothing with B. Rudofsky, Sculpture with Jose DeCreeft, Composition with Charlot, Photography with J. Breitenbach, Wood/ Plastics with J. Prestini, General Design with J. Albers, Art Education with B. Boas/V. D’Amico/and H Thomas, Art Appreciation with J. Newmann, Color with J. Albers, Eukinetics withKahl

Winter1944-1945:Introductory Mathematics with Dehn, Dialogs withPlato with Dehn, Painting with J. Albers, Design with Albers, Chorus with Jalowetz

Spring 1944-1945: Painting with Albers, Design with Albers, Drawing with Albers, Plato’s Dialogs with Dehn, Introductory Mathematics with Dehn, and Chorus with Jalowetz

Summer 1948: Dance with Merce Cunningham, Color with Albers, Structure of Music with Cage

Fall 1948-1949: Physics with N. Goldowsky, Taught Dancing Class, Weaving with Anni Albers/Trudi Guermonprez, Textile Design with Anni Albers

Spring 1948-1949: Elementary Mathematics with Goldowsky, Textile Construction II with Anni Albers, Hindu Dance with Vashi and Hindu Philosophy with Vashi