Beatrice Wood, called the Mama of Dada, was a renowned ceramicist, lover of Marcel Duchamp, and a prime suspect in the Dada art movement of the early 1910’s. She died in 1998 at 105 years of age. Her ceramics were eccentric (like herself), with strange shapes, and iridescent glazes. She was quite a ticket, and beautiful, even as an older woman.
After Dada she became a follower of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and, in a circuitous way, this brought about her apprenticeship in ceramics.
This is a 5 minute clip from a 55 minute documentary from the Documentary Channel. I’ve seen the whole thing some time ago, and it’s a great documentary–well worth the $.99 that it costs to buy the whole thing from Google Video.
(As an aside, it’s a pain in the but to get it on a Linux machine–but not that big a one–you have to manually download the .gvp file (click the “Manually Download the Video” link) and open up that file with a text editor–gedit worked fine in Gnome–look for the line that starts “url:http://vp.video.google.com/videodownload?…” copy that minus the url: part, paste it in your browser, and it’ll download as an .avi file, which you can play in any media player on Linux. It’s much easier for Windows, and even Macs.) (Or, as I just found out because Firefox crashed while downloading it–close out your browser, and go back to the video, and click on the download for Windows/Mac link, and download it that way–as long as you’re still logged in to your Google account.)