The Remarkable Story of the Mountain Lake Workshops
June 29, 2026
In the summer of 1998 a broken weedeater, a computer monitor, a broom, jars, and other discarded household objects became works of art.
Gathered at Mountain Lake in nearby Giles County, students and community members spent a week creating Souls on Garbage (1998), a collaborative project conceived by Japanese artist Jiro Okura. Participants coated discarded household objects in white paint and traced them in black ink using Okura's distinctive "breathing line" technique, transforming everyday refuse into something contemplative and sacred.
Today, visitors to the center’s summer 2026 exhibition, Jiro Okura: A Line of Breath Between Wood and Light, can see the work for themselves. But Souls on Garbage is more than an installation. It offers a glimpse into the Mountain Lake Workshop, an ambitious series of collaborative programs that shaped a unique chapter in Virginia Tech's artistic history.
For more than three decades, the Mountain Lake Symposium and Workshop project brought internationally acclaimed artists, students, scholars, and community members together to explore big ideas and create collaborative works rooted in the landscape and culture of Southwest Virginia. Founded in 1980 by Ray Kass, professor emeritus of art in Virginia Tech’s School of Visual Arts, and originally called the Mountain Lake programs, it evolved from interdisciplinary symposia into immersive creative experiences where art emerged through shared exploration and collective making.
As Susan Glasser wrote in her 2020 review of a book detailing the workshops (Mountain Lake Symposium and Workshop: Art in Locale), “What made the Mountain Lake Symposium and Workshop project so valuable was a near perfect complement of convening a mélange of thoughtful people immersed in big ideas, a commitment to an interdisciplinarity that did not privilege one body of knowledge over another, a conviction in the potential of collective creativity, and a longitudinal effort that shaped a shared set of values, ideas, and meanings.”
The roster of artists and thinkers who passed through Mountain Lake is astonishing.
Artists You Might Be Surprised to Learn Came to Mountain Lake
John Cage
The groundbreaking composer and artist, whose work embraced chance and experimentation, participated in Mountain Lake programs and found in Southwest Virginia an audience eager for big ideas.
Sally Mann
Long before becoming one of the country's most celebrated photographers, Mann joined the conversations and collaborations that made Mountain Lake unique.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Known for her pioneering work around maintenance, labor, and the environment, Ukeles explored themes that resonate strongly today.
What Mountain Lake Meant to Jiro Okura
For Okura, Mountain Lake became more than a destination. It became a collaborator.
Born in Tokyo and active in Kyoto, Okura’s participation in the workshop from 1990-1998 is considered among the most poetic and conceptually nuanced contributions in the program’s history. His work incorporates natural forces such as gravity, wind, light, and found materials, reflecting a deep reverence for nature and a commitment to imperfection and process.
Working alongside students, artists, and members of the local community, Okura created Mountain Lake Screen Tachi (1990), a monumental installation of 16 painted and gilded folding screens that stretched more than 100 feet across an Appalachian hillside. The work formed a bridge between cultures and between nature and art, embodying the collaborative spirit that defined the workshops. The center’s current exhibition features panels from the work.
As Glasser explains, “The earnestness of the Mountain Lake project throws into high relief the superficiality of much of today’s bombastic art; art is not going to solve the climate crisis (as an example) or even promote an awareness of issues in any way that isn’t better achieved by political action, news articles, and documentaries. But it can remind us of why we should care, why nature defines us as much as we shape it.”
More than 25 years after this work was created, Jiro Okura: A Line of Breath Between Wood and Light is a testament to what can happen when artists, students, neighbors, and ideas from around the world come together in one place.
The exhibition is on view through Saturday, Aug. 22, across all galleries at the Center for the Arts. The exhibition and related events are free and open to the public.
Top image is of Wind Rock overlook on the Appalachian Trail in the Mountain Lake wilderness. Photo by Luke Hayes for Virginia Tech.