Beatrice Wood, 1922, Photograph by Jesse Tarbox Beals, Courtesy Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts.
Kevin Wallace, Founding Director of the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, will offer a free Powerpoint presentation on Saturday, July 6th at 4 pm, in conjunction with the closing reception for the Center’s American Ceramic Society exhibition.
Beatrice Wood was part of the Dada Movement and, in sharing her story with visitors at the Center, the question regularly comes up – What is DADA?
It is not an easy question to answer, largely because the artists refused to be defined or categorized. It was also an international movement with a different group of Dadaists in Zurich pursuing somewhat different agendas than those in New York City, or with later incarnations in Berlin and Paris.
At its heart, Dada was an anti-establishment movement created in reaction to World War I, with artists believing that a civilization that embraced such a senseless and tragic war needed to be reinvented. The artists did this by exploring new approaches to art, music, dance, fashion, entertainment, and language itself. The Dada Movement was hugely influential, and its impact is obvious in contemporary art today. While there was no official end to the movement, it segued into Surrealism, with many of the same artists going on to be associated with that art movement.
In his lecture, Wallace will discuss the fascinating artists who were part of the Dada Movement, the philosophies they embraced, and the works they created. It promises to be a fun, educational and thought-provoking event.
The Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts is located at 8585 Ojai-Santa Paula Road in Upper Ojai.
