The most recently added collection contains 25 pieces by the notable ceramist Beatrice Wood. The collection’s donor, Bruce Jewett, began purchasing the ceramics directly from the artist at her studio in Ojai, California in 1971, and continued to do so every year until 1991. These important ceramics were first exhibited at the Kellogg University Art Gallery in 1999 and prominently featured in various exhibitions over the decades.

About Beatrice Wood

“I owe it all to art books, chocolates, and young men,” Beatrice Wood would often tell those who made the pilgrimage to her Ojai, California studio before the artist passed away in 1998. There they’d find the fabled artist, in the last years of her life, swathed in a sari while working the potter’s wheel, and flanked by all manner of sacred objects: healing crystals, Hindu icons, and her signature opalescent vessels. For Wood, who lived to the age of 105 and made work up until her penultimate year, ‘art books, chocolates, and young men’ became the trifecta to which she attributed her longevity, and an abbreviation for the rich ingredients that made up her life. But the tagline, as her devout fan-base will tell you, doesn’t do Wood, or her work, justice.

Wood was a member of the New York Dada group and a pioneering sculptor. As a woman artist primarily working in ceramics, she also represented a demographic and a medium that were both marginalized during her lifetime. When discussing Wood’s legacy, more people tend to know her for sleeping with Duchamp than for making her own work. Wood met Marcel Duchamp in New York in 1916. Though a 1993 documentary later dubbed Wood the “Mama of Dada,” she is rarely listed among the movement’s pioneers –marginalized, ignored or erased– as were most women artists at the time. But in 1917, both she and Duchamp submitted works to the Society of Independent Artists’ first exhibition, which would double as Dada’s first public introduction. While Duchamp’s contribution to the show —a found urinal turned on its head titled Fountain (1917), which would later be seen as a watershed moment in the history of modern art— it was Wood’s Un peut (peu) d'eau dans du savon (A Little Water in Some Soap) (1917), that caused public uproar at the time. “She was…the sensation of the show,” explains Francis Naumann, a Dada scholar and dealer. “Her work was attacked by the press.” The offending painting showed a woman’s naked torso with a real piece of soap affixed “at a very tactical position,” Wood would later explain. She and Duchamp also founded the seminal Dada journal, The Blind Man, with artist Henri-Pierre Roché. In one issue, Wood penned an article defending Duchamp’s Fountain. “The only works of art America has given to the world are her plumbing and her bridges,” she mused, which is a comment often erroneously attributed to Duchamp himself. While Duchamp no doubt served as a mentor to Wood, her rebellious creativity didn’t start —or end— with him. “Beatrice was a romantic, but she never allowed a man to control her life —ever,” explains Naumann. “She paid her own bills from the very beginning to the end.”

Wood was born into a wealthy San Francisco family in 1893, but in her 20s she renounced their fortune, setting into motion a life of autonomy that was rare for women of her generation. She also distanced herself from Duchamp’s orbit as she grew to middle age. After her irreverent debut in the New York art scene, Wood eventually relocated to California, where she began making the shimmering ceramic vessels and satirical figurative sculptures that she’s become known for.

Wood started using clay, somewhat haphazardly, at the age of 40. Spurred by a desire to create a teapot to match a set of plates she owned, she enlisted in a pottery course at Hollywood High School, then went on to apprentice with ceramicists Gertrud and Otto Natzler. Wood was soon applying her signature panache to the medium, forging vessels and chalices jeweled with hand-hewn details --little blobs of clay arranged into intricate, uneven patterns; naked figures pared down to silhouettes-- and coated in glazes that give the effect of churning crystal balls. Her work was considered very basic and very exotic at the same time. “She was also taking a somewhat Persian aesthetic and glaze technology at a time when the information that American potters were pulling from was primarily from Japan. She was just on her own path.”

The famed Ojai potter Beatrice Wood is the primary focus of the Bruce Jewett Ceramic Collection. Twenty-five of her lustrous ceramics are featured in this collection, along with photographs of the artist, and her hand-made book.