October is American Archives Month and we are celebrating by looking at some of the tools of the trade used by George Woodman and Betty Woodman in our collection.

In 1999, The Ohio Review—a long-running literary journal published by the English Department at Ohio University—included a portfolio of thirteen photographs and an accompanying essay by George Woodman, appearing among pages of poetry, prose and fiction.

This exhibition delves into the depths where imagination meets reality, considering ways the sea has been a source of adventure and destruction throughout history.

Over the past few months, the Foundation delved into Betty Woodman's and George Woodman’s personal library as part of our ongoing work to build a study center. Betty Woodman’s books on Japanese textiles and woodblock prints, in particular, are extensively bookmarked, with pages cut and ripped away by the artist. She often amassed many of these books on her travels regardless of whether she could read the language, choosing instead to let the images weave themselves into her visual lexicon.

This month, explore two group exhibitions in New York showcasing diverse works by Betty Woodman from the 1990s and 2000s.

Hello, this is Rehan Miskci. I recently joined The Woodman Foundation as their Digital Imaging and Photography Manager. I’m lucky to be involved with Francesca, Betty and George Woodman’s works on a daily basis and oversee any image-based needs.

Sixty years ago, before they had traveled much of the world together, the Woodman family visited the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

Becoming the archivist at the Woodman Family Foundation sometimes feels oddly inevitable to me. I was introduced to Francesca Woodman’s images as a photography major at RISD twenty years after her time there and remember being both besotted with and intimidated by her work.

As the Woodman Family Foundation’s Collections Researcher, I spend a good amount of my working hours digging around libraries and special collections scattered throughout New York City. I believe the artists of the Woodman Family Foundation were equally as inspired by this bustling and beautiful metropolis as I am.

As the Foundation’s registrar, I have the privilege of managing Betty, George, and Francesca Woodman’s artwork inventories. Though impossible to select a favorite object from such a prolific inventory, one of my favorite groups of works are Betty’s paintings on sketch paper.

The Woodman Family Foundation archives include boxes and boxes of family photographs, spanning the early days George and Betty spent in Albuquerque where they welcomed their son Charlie into the world; to their move to a modernist home in Boulder—the site of many birthday parties, pottery sales, impromptu installations of paintings and Francesca’s earliest experiments with “dress up;” until just a few years ago enjoying breakfast with their grandson Alexander in both New York and Antella.

Hi, this is Molly McBride Jacobson, archives intern at the Woodman Family Foundation. One of my projects has been inventorying, condensing, and rehousing Betty Woodman’s slide collection, which she used to document her work from the 1970s until the mid-2000s. She used this collection as a pre-digital database, arranging her slides by year and then separately by format.