Mary Parks Washington heard about Black Mountain at the end of her senior year at Spelman College in Atlanta where she majored in art. Her teacher Hale Woodruff told her about a scholarship being offered by the Rosenwald Fund for study at the 1946 Summer Art Institute at Black Mountain. The college had enrolled its first black students in the summer of 1944, and Washington remembered that althoughthe South was still segregated, she felt comfortable attending.

She took classes with Jean Varda, Josef Albers, Beaumont Newhall, Leo Amino, and Concetta Scaravaglione. She also studied dance with Gwendolyn Lawrence. In Atlanta where her father Walter Parks was a shoe “rebuilder” – she recalled that he not only repaired shoes but he also built shoes for people with problem feet – Washington had attended the Atlanta University Elementary, Chadwick School, and the Atlanta Public Schools before enrolling at Spelman College. There she studied art with Elizabeth Prophet, William Artist and Hale Woodruff.

Woodruff encouraged her to attend the Art Students League in New York for one summer where she studied with Reginald Marsh. When Washington left Black Mountain at the end of the summer, she returned to Atlanta where she taught school for two years. A

fter her marriage to Samuel Washington, a Tuskegee pilot with the 332nd who later became a psychiatric social worker, she lived in Fort Devins in Massachusetts, Sampson Air Force Base in New York, and for a year in Japan.

They then moved to Campbell, California where she continued her art work while teaching, rearing her son and daughter, and working for her Master of Arts degree in painting from San José State University. In California she renewed her friendship, with Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence, Jean Varda and Ruth Asawa.

Washington developed a collage form which she calls “histcollage,” in which she incorporates family photographs and documents into paintings. Collages recalling her childhood in Atlanta were exhibited as Atlanta: Remembrances, Impressions and Reflections at The Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American Culture and History in Atlanta in 1996. She has used travel to both experience different cultures and to study art.

Above biography written by Mary Emma Harris for the Black Mountain College project.

Mary Parks Washington, excerpt from “New Dungarees,” In The North Carolina Literary Review (The Black Mountain College Issue), Vol. II, No. 2 (1995):

"My mentor and teacher, Hale Woodruff, at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, informed me that I had been awarded a Rosenwald scholarship to Black Mountain College in North Carolina for the summer of 1946. Mr. Woodruff explained that Black Mountain was the setting for creative experiences with a unique set of principles: no course hours, no credit points or tests.

Faculty and students not only maintained the campus, they ran a farm and constructed the college buildings. Black Mountain promised to be quite the opposite of Spelman, a woman’s college headed by Florence Reid, whose expectations of students were like those of Mount Holyoke College, her alma mater. I grew up in a very formal atmosphere of rules, curriculums, and protocols.

Atlanta in those days was a segregated city, and it was different, if not impossible, for mind and spirit to operate freely in such a system. Only on the campuses of black colleges was free association between black and white citizens possible – chapel programs, convocation with outstanding scholars, museums, and artists – all added richness and challenge in the minds and spirits of the participants.

I arrived at Black Mountain with my new dungarees specially purchased for the occasion because I had never worn pants. I settled in a dormitory with several other young women and was thrilled with my individual studio."

Black Mountain College Project

Mary Emma Harris interviewed Mary in 2002 and the transcript is available from Appalachian State University under The Mary Emma Harris and Black Mountain College Project, Inc. Oral History collection.

Topics: Introduction to BMC through Hale Woodruff at Spelman – Rosenwald Fund – BMC community – Ruth Asawa – as African-American student at BMC – description of Studies Building – classes withJean Varda, Josef Albers and Concetta Scaravaglione – dance classes with Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence – segregation of buses – life in San Francisco area and artist friends – influence of BMC – Leo Amino sculpture class – dances at BMC – college community – childhood in African-American community in Atlanta – discussion of BMC photographs