Politics & Power Quote by Beatrice Wood

There is a bright, almost mischievous boosterism in Beatrice Wood calling American craft "the most wonderful" - and it lands differently because she wasn’t selling a slogan, she was living a long argument against the idea that craft is second-tier. Wood came out of the Dada-adjacent avant-garde, where mockery of "high culture" was part of the point. So when she praises craft in America, you can hear both sincerity and a sly provocation: the real innovation might be happening in clay, glaze, and the studio, not just on gallery walls or in European capitals.

The line also sits in a specific 20th-century shift. American modernism loved the myth of the new: new money, new landscapes, new art forms. Craft benefited from that hunger, especially as the U.S. built its own institutions, schools, and markets for handmade work. Wood’s phrasing quietly claims legitimacy for an ecosystem - teachers, kiln builders, local scenes - rather than for a single genius. It’s a communal flex.

Subtext: she’s redirecting attention from imported prestige to domestic practice, from avant-garde theory to touch and technique. "Wonderful" isn’t an argument; it’s an invitation to look closer. Coming from an artist who moved between scandalous circles and disciplined studio labor, the sentence functions like a wink: the future of art might be hiding in what people used to dismiss as decorative.