Otis Levy

Courtesy of Western Regional Archives

FOCUS

Performance Art

ROLE

Student

ATTENDANCE

1942 - 1943

Otis Levy was a student in 1942 to 1943, until he was drafted. Otis participated in many plays at the college including Ethan Frome, The Insanity of Love, Moliere, Quare Medicine, and The Imaginary Invalid.

Relationships

Wife: Fellow BMC student, Faith Murray

Asheville Art Museum Collection

Writings about Otis 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:

There are many more than shared below, where Otis shared letters after being drafted, sharing of his travels and continued efforts in play writing.

2017.40.082 November 1942 bulletin,

“Quare Medicine”, a one-act comedy by Paul Green will be presented in the Dining Hall on Saturday evening, beginning at 8.30 o’clock. The cast will include Dick Brown, Betty Kelley, Herbert Oppenheimer, and Paul Snyder. The scenery is being prepared by Bruno Piscitello, Otis Levy and Bill Berry. Tom Emmons is in charge of properties.

2017.40.346 January 1943 bulletin, "Plays in rehearsal at the present time are the Owen Davis- Donald Davis dramatization of Edith Whatron’s “Ethan Frome”, and Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid”. Next term will see work started on Maeterlinch’s “The Blue Bird”, to be presented as part of the Asheville Children’s Theatre series. Three scripts were sent to the Carolina Dramatic Association’s annual contest for original plays; they included Erik Haugaard’s full-length “Each Year the Snow Falls”, Otis Levy’s one-act “The Insanity of Love”, and Will Hamlin’s radio script, “Mr Whitcomb and the Horse”."

2017.40.093 February 1943 bulletin,

"There will be no concert on Saturday evening. Instead there will be a Valentine Ball. It has been requested that no visitors be invited for the occasion. Otis Levy’s original one-act skit, “The Insanity of Love”, will be presented during the evening. It is being directed by Otis."

2017.40.138 January 1944 bulletin,

"A/S Otis Levy writes from Pullman, Washington: “The results of the Dramatists Alliance Contest sponsored by Stanford University came last night… Some woman from Canada won the money, and I won ‘Secondary Honors’.”"

Photograph of author

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.

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