ELEMENTS OF BMC: Intuitive Photography and Collage Workshop

ELEMENTS OF BMC: Collaborating with Ghosts – Intuitive Photography and Collage with Anna Helgeson
Saturday, July 12th, 2025 at 12PM
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
Workshop $15 Per Participant 

ELEMENTS OF BMC is a new series that explores the fundamental parts of creative practice at Black Mountain College, highlighting a range of artistic mediums and techniques. The series investigates the role of these elements in shaping the college’s legacy and lasting influence on contemporary art.

About the Workshop:

We are all haunted; by ideas, history, ancestors (biological and otherwise), and by animating forces we can not quite explain. This workshop will welcome the possibility of collaborating with these mysterious forces.

Participants will be led through a guided meditation (which is nothing to be afraid of) before going on an intuitive photo walk around downtown Asheville. We will then return to BMC Art Center to create collages based on the photographic discoveries collected. There is no right or wrong way to engage with this workshop, unless you allow ideas of right and wrong to control your actions, that would clearly be wrong.

No photography experience necessary, any image capturing device will work, including your phone, a point and shoot camera, a fancy DSLR.

About Anna Helgeson:

Curiosity and wonder drive the practice of Anna Helgeson. She is compelled to create, most often using photography, performance, and collage. Her projects start with a question; How did Meleva Maric’s (Einstein’s first wife) contributions to the theory of relativity get erased? What does the physical and phycological distance between reservations and high schools with “Indian” mascots look like? What can I learn from a rock? Or questions that turns into acts of resistance; How can I de-neutralize my whiteness and call attention to the invention and maintenance of race? Most recently she has been working on a long term project exploring the nature of animacy, ghostly apparitions, and the impact of pathologizing outspoken women.

Part of her process is research; seeking out archives, historic records and philosophical texts, and part of her process is intuitive with an appreciation for the vastness of what we do not know. The act of photographing and painting is also an act of devotion for her, and she feels most connected to the largeness of life when engaged in these activities.

She received a BA from Ripon College, and an MFA (Cum Laude) from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She has exhibited, performed, and lectured throughout the United States including: The Bascom: A Center for the Visual Arts (Highlands, NC), John W. Bardo Fine and Performing Arts Center (Cullowhee, NC), Holden Gallery (Swannanoa, NC),The Asheville Art Museum (Asheville, NC), The University of North Carolina, Asheville (Asheville, NC), Revolve Gallery (Asheville, NC), Work Gallery (Detroit, MI), The Milwaukee Art Museum, Lucky Star Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Union Gallery, and is featured on the website “Reframing Photography; Theory and Practice” (Routledge Press).

The photographs, paintings, and collages in What Light Knows are the result of a three year collaboration with nine ghosts; nine women who died in the Highland Hospital fire in 1948. Each of them were sedated and locked in their rooms at the time of the fire, deemed “unfit or wonderers”. Highland Hospital specialized in treating people who had been diagnosed with hysteria or what was then called nervous disorders. These diagnoses were frequently assigned to outspoken women with inconvenient opinions or passionate emotions. The collaborations began with long exposure photographs shot at the former sight of Highland Hospital, located less than a mile from her home in Asheville, North Carolina. The theme of her workshop is Collaging with Ghosts.