Southampton - In conjunction with the exhibition "Dorothea Rockburne: In My Mind's Eye," the Parrish Art Museum will present an illustrated lecture by Vincent Katz on Black Mountain College, the now-legendary faculty-owned and run school where Rockburne studied from 1950 to 1952. The lecture is scheduled for Thursday, July 14, 6 p.m., and is free for Parrish members, $10 for nonmembers.

Katz is a poet, translator, art critic, editor, and curator. Katz curated the exhibition Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid and wrote the accompanying catalogue, which was published by the MIT Press in 2002. He writes frequently on contemporary art and has published essays on the work of Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, Kiki Smith, and Cy Twombly, among others. He has curated exhibitions in Valencia, Spain, the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, and at the Museum of the City of New York. Katz has written nine books of poetry, won the 2005 National Translation Award for his book of translations in Latin, and produced, with Vivien Bittencourt, film documentaries on Rudy Burckhardt, Kiki Smith, and his father Alex Katz.

Although it lasted only 23 years (1933-1956) and enrolled fewer than 1,200 students, Black Mountain College was one of the most fabled experimental institutions in art education and practice. Its art teachers included Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Buckminster Fuller, and Robert Motherwell, and among their students were Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Dorothea Rockburne. The performing arts teachers included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, and Stefan Wolpe, and among the literature teachers and students were Robert Creeley, Fielding Dawson, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Francine du Plessix Gray, Charles Olson, M.C. Richards, and John Wieners.

But it was the renowned German mathemetician Max Dehn, who was a close friend of Albert Einstein, who had perhaps the greatest effect on Rockburne's creative thinking, educating her in the concepts of harmonic intervals, Pythagoean and Euclidean geometry, group theory, and topology. "Dehn had a lively, disciplined, but fearless mind," Rockburne has written. "He showed that every kind of growth has recognizable mathematical properties."

Vincent Katz will discuss the college, Dorothea Rockburne's experience there, and the relationship between the college and such artists and writers of the East End as Esteban Vicente, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Clement Greenberg, John Chamberlain, and Helen Frankenthaler, all of whom studied or taught there.

The Museum's programs are made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York State's 62 counties, and the property taxpayers from the Southampton School District and the Tuckahoe Common School District.