Thelma Wood - Sculpting Career, Volatile Relationships

Sculpting Career, Volatile Relationships

Although always considering herself a sculptor, Wood is little known for her work, and better known for her usually unstable lesbian relationships with other famous women of the time.Although very little of her work survives, Wood's drawings were exhibited at least once, at Milch Galleries in New York City in 1931, where they were favorably reviewed. Wood's sketchbook from a trip to Berlin is in the Barnes papers at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Around 1921, she moved from St. Louis to Paris in order to study sculpture, and visited Berlin, a party city at the time for those with foreign money. Wood seemed drawn to a partying lifestyle, and was said to have enjoyed excessive alcohol consumption, and being involved in casual sexual relationships. Accounts from the time, and from those who knew her, have described her as "boyish-looking", standing almost 6 feet tall, and "sexually magnetic".

In the fall of 1921, photographer Berenice Abbott met Wood and became her lover for a brief time. Abbott remained a close friend to Wood for life. She later introduced Wood to poet Djuna Barnes, and made photographic portraits of both of them. Wood also had a brief relationship with the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay during the early 1920s.