Black Mountain Misfits

Background

The commute problem

I have an hour plus commute from the suburbs of New Jersey to midtown Manhattan. Most days I would listen to an audio book while I work, or turn my brain off by doom scrolling to fills time. As a designer, that scrolling was especially costly. Instead of recharging my creativity, I was spending it. I wasn't growing. I wasn't learning. I was just consuming.

The prompt that changed the pattern

I had a conversation with Muse, then a secret project at Meta, about wanting to use that dead commute time differently. Not productively in the corporate sense. I wanted to be inspired. I wanted to learn about art and culture the way you learn when you follow your own curiosity rather than an algorithm's.

It was an instagram reel that introduced me to Yayoi Kusama how she covered the things that scared her with dots because that made them less scary, how art was how she battled her challenges with mental health. I brought her up and shared the video and said I wanted to learn more about other artists like her, that first conversation cracked something open.

Forming a taste

After Kusama, I learned about Agnes Martin, her carefully crafted grids, her ability to speak to the beauty of innocence. A hand-drawn line at the scale of a standing body. Then Louise Bourgeois and her rooms built from salvaged doors, which protect and trap with one wall. Eva Hesse and her nineteen attempts at the same bucket, in materials that agree to age. Ruth Asawa, who looped one wire until the boundary and the opening were the same act. Chiharu Shiota, whose rooms of thread hold objects that belonged to strangers. Atsuko Tanaka, who wore two hundred lightbulbs and then painted the wiring for fifty years.

After a week I realized something was happening. I was forming my taste discovering what I was drawn to, and why. A pattern emerged across all seven artists: they used repetition, enclosure, and erasure, and arrived at completely different places. The theme I landed on was "quiet obliteration" a story of women in art.

What I did

The Black Mountain moment

Learning about Ruth Asawa, I heard about Black Mountain College the experimental school in North Carolina (1933–1957) with its groundbreaking belief that art should be centered in education. Not art as decoration. Art as a way of thinking.

That idea stuck with me harder than any single artist. It made me want to put these learnings out into the world and see if we could create our own group of misfits people who learn by following strange connections rather than following a feed.

Building the anti-feed

Black Mountain Misfits became an editorial publication art, poetry, philosophy, literature, and the threads between them built as a deliberate alternative to the scroll.

Design decisions rooted in the thesis:

• Everything is finite
  Issues have a last chapter. Threads have a last stop. Pages end. "The issue ends here" is a line the site actually says out loud.
• No recommendation engine 
  Every connection between two pieces was made by a person and comes with a written reason. When I can't say why two things belong together, I don't link them.
• Doors, not feeds 
  At the end of a piece, you get one or two doors not a wall of options. You're meant to leave.
• Honest blanks over fake images 
  Where I don't hold image rights, the site shows a labelled empty plate with the artist, title, date, and a description, rather than a generated approximation. Nothing on the site pretends to be an artwork.

Making it by hand

The visual identity is literally hand-drawn. I hand-lettered the logo, the wordmark, and the page section headers "Works," "Notes" each with a hand-drawn strikethrough accent in the same brush style. The hero sentence on the homepage has a hand-drawn circle ringing one word ("threads"), because a CSS underline would have been too clean for a site about things made by hand. Even the navigation underlines are hand-sketched SVGs. The whole system reads as a rare, annotated book that happens to be a website paper texture, crop-mark frames around every image, monospaced captions, oxide-red accents.

The gate: its own quiet obliteration

The first thing a visitor sees isn't the site it's a net. A mesh of particles and threads, pinned along the top edge and hanging like a curtain under gravity and gentle wind, with the word "ENTER" sitting behind it in oxide red. Move your cursor near it and the net pushes and sways. Swipe fast and you cut it threads permanently sever, pieces fray into dangling strands, sections fall away.

It's a nod to Ruth Asawa's looped-wire sculptures, where the boundary and the opening are the same gesture. But it's also the site performing its own thesis before you've read a word of it: obliteration as an act of revealing. You tear through the net to get in. The fabric doesn't bounce back. What you've cut stays cut. And then you enter.

The first issue

Issue 01 Women in Art: Quiet Obliteration is seven chapters, each following one artist and one tool: dots, grids, rooms, buckets, wire, thread, light. The chapters are connected by a thread called Repetition, which follows the same mechanism out of art history and into a poem by Gertrude Stein, a room in Jane Eyre, and a school in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The closing line: "Seven women, one procedure, and no agreement between them about what it is for which is the most useful thing this constellation has to offer."

What AI actually did (and didn't do)

This started as an AI conversation, but the AI was the match, not the fire. Muse surfaced Kusama. The rest the taste, the pattern, the thesis, the editorial voice, the decision to build something finite in a world of infinite feeds was human judgment shaped by commute-length conversations.

The site itself is built with AI as a collaborator: Claude helped with code, editorial structure, and the content rules that enforce the site's own promises (every door carries a reason, every thread stop a note, every plate alt text). But no AI chose which artists belong together, or wrote the reasons why.

What I learned

AI is a thinking partner, not a thinking replacement 

The most valuable thing Muse did was ask me a question I hadn't thought to ask myself: what kind of art do you actually care about? The answer women who use the same tool to arrive at opposite destinations wasn't in any dataset. It emerged from a week of commute conversations, and it became the foundation for everything that followed.

Taste is a design skill

Forming a point of view about what you're drawn to and being able to articulate why is the same muscle as forming a design opinion. This side quest made me a sharper designer, not because I learned art history, but because I practiced having a perspective.

The anti-pattern is the product

Every design decision in Black Mountain Misfits is a refusal of something the feed does well. That constraint build the opposite of scrolling turned out to be the strongest creative brief I've ever written for myself.