Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts

The story

Before she was throwing erotic earthenware and metallic luster chalices in the Topatopa mountains, Beatrice Wood was running through 1910s Manhattan with Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché. She co-edited the avant-garde magazine *The Blind Man* with Duchamp, earned the title 'Mama of Dada,' and served as the real-life vertex of the romantic triangle Roché later fictionalized in *Jules and Jim*. Then, in her late thirties, she walked away from New York art society, took a ceramics class at Hollywood High School to make a teapot to match some shiny glazes she liked, and spent the rest of her century-long life glued to a pottery wheel.

In 1948, Wood moved to Upper Ojai to be near spiritual philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti and the Theosophical community at Happy Valley. She built a studio on the ridge, wrapped herself in bright Indian saris, and unlocked secret reduction glaze recipes that chemical engineers could never reliably duplicate—producing unpredictable, shimmering copper, gold, and blue lusters on chalices, playful nudes, and vessels guarded by tiny monkeys. James Cameron even visited her at age 102 to research the rebellious, pottery-throwing persona of Rose for *Titanic*.

She kept working until her death in 1998 at age 105, famously attributing her longevity to 'chocolate and young men.' Today, her home and studio are maintained by the Happy Valley Foundation as an art center. It isn't a sterile gallery; her nepalese wood carvings, folk art, kilns, books, and test glazes sit in the high-desert sun exactly where she left them.