American Art Collaborative

Tides in a Man’s Life shows the three stages of a man’s struggle to the top of Beatrice Wood’s sculpture. At first, he is shown unsuccessfully trying to climb the tall base of the sculpture. He then reappears being helped up by a woman, while the third and final stage shows him standing triumphantly atop the golden ring. Wood first began making these stick figures in the 1940s, and she did not want to define them as specific people but rather used them to focus on issues of gender