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
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“To-morrow I will have finished four-score years. I have lived to rise from the most despised and hated woman in all the world of fifty years ago, until now it seems as if I am loved by you all. If this is true, then I am indeed satisfied.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)