Early Years
Her father’s career took her family to Puerto Rico where she spent her childhood years in the beauty and freedom of its tropical environment, taking drawing classes, performing in a small flamenco company, playing guitar, and singing South American folk songs. This experience proved to have a seminal influence on her future career.
Returning to Washington, D.C. for her last two years of high school, Marilyn studied painting at the Corcoran Gallery and then attended Oberlin College, with a career in the arts in mind, and graduated in 1950. She was soon drawn to the program of Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus Institute of Design in Chicago and their tradition-challenging approaches to the visual arts, architecture, and design. It was in experimenting with the dimensionality of sculpture combined with student dance classes in improvised movement that she had this epiphany: “I discovered I could BE the sculpture!” which led to two summer sessions with Hanya Holm at Colorado College and further solidified her shift from painting to dance.
Read more about this topic: Marilyn Wood
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