Mendez Marks, Jr.
Crop of "Robert Wunsch teaching Drama students outside on the Blue Ridge campus"
Robert Wunsch with drama students, Mendez Marks and Betty Kelley. Courtesy of Western Regional Archives
FOCUS
Performance Art
ROLE
Student
ATTENDANCE
1940 - 1942
Mendez Marks was a drama student at the college from at least 1940 to 1942.
Asheville Art Museum Collection
Writings about Mendez can be seen in digitized college bulletins on Asheville Art Museum's collection website: collection.ashevilleart.org. They can be found by searching his name, to find quotes as below:
A college bulletin from May 1941 shares that he also produced his own plays while a student, "Mendez Marks’ original one-act play, “So Proudly We Hail”, was first in the Senior College contest for original plays" and another from May 1942, "Mendez Marks will read aloud his full-length play in Room 10 during the evening. The time will be announced later. This play is a full-length rewriting of “The Wind and the Trees.”
College bulletins also show that he went on to work at the New Yorker; September 1943 bulletin, "Mendez Marks, now on the staff of The New Yorker, had a story in the August 25 issue of the magazine."
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.
