When Ruth Duckworth titles her work—a rare occurrence—she uses large names: The Guardian (1992), The Spirit of Survival (1996), The Creation (1984). The other 79 pieces in the show, Ruth Duckworth, Modernist Sculptor, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum Renwick Gallery are untitled, suggesting that Duckworth is chasing after something unutterable.

When she first went to school as a teenager, she announced her desire “to paint like Rembrandt, draw like Dürer, and sculpt like Michelangelo—pretty insane,” she says in the 2004 video, Ruth Duckworth: A Life in Clay, which continually streams in the last room of the exhibit.

Duckworth insists in the film, “I’m fairly good at obstacles, and somehow or other, I get over them.” These obstacles included frequent illnesses that led Duckworth to miss one third of her classes and discovering at age 15 that she was Jewish living under Hitler, when her sister told her one night about her true heritage. “I was shocked,” said Ruth in the film, explaining that at the time she was attending a Lutheran school and associated Jews with Christ-killers. Even as she came to terms with her Jewish identity, Duckworth found herself joining her classmates when Hitler came to visit. She was unable to refrain from heiling Hitler, because she would have stood out amongst her peers.