Beato Chocolates and the Legacy of Beatrice Wood
By Jennifer Richardson
Beato Chocolates, a 2-year-old fair-trade certified chocolatier in Ojai, takes its name from Beatrice Wood’s nickname, the moniker she used to sign her work. Wood, who lived in Ojai for 50 years until her death at age 105 in 1998, is the town’s matriarch of the arts, famous for her luster-glaze pottery. Earlier in life she met Marcel Duchamp and became active in the New York Dada group— an art movement founded in response to the First World War—defending Duchamp’s iconic urinal installation in an essay in The Blind Man, a short-lived Dadaist journal.