Nicknamed the “Mama of Dada” for her early collaborations with artists like Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood chose ceramics as her medium after taking an adult education pottery class in 1933. She enrolled after purchasing some baroque dessert plates with luster glaze, for which she hoped to make a matching teapot. Though she never made that teapot, she dedicated herself to ceramics for the rest of her life. Her signature use of scintillating luster glazes lends her vessels an emotive, shimmering quality of iridescent euphoria. Author Anaïs Nin once wrote of her friend’s pottery, “Beatrice Wood combines her colors like a painter, makes them vibrate like a musician. They have strength even while iridescent and transparent. They have the rhythm and luster both of jewels and human eyes. Water poured from one of her jars will taste like wine.”

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