<i>Communitas</i> : Gate Hill Coop and the Transitoriness of Bauhaus and Black Mountain College

Abstract This article argues that the legacies of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College are best understood not through narratives of institutional endurance, but through their conditions of dissolution—what Paul and Percival Goodman termed “transitoriness” in Communitas (1947). Tracing the migration of people and ideas from Germany to North Carolina and ultimately to Gate Hill Coop in Stony Point, NY, the article foregrounds the affective, often invisible labor—particularly by women—required to sustain collective life after collapse. It centers M.C. Richards (1916–1999) as a key interlocutor whose translations of language, philosophy, and pedagogy enabled experimental art practices to take root in communal settings. Rather than viewing Gate Hill as a failed utopia, the article positions it as a site of ethical, interdisciplinary experimentation grounded in care and adaptability. In doing so, it challenges art history's privileging of singular authorship and institutional prestige, proposing instead a historiographic pliability that centers precarity, process, and collective redistribution.