Betty Woodman

For over fifty years, the Woodman family has enjoyed many meals and conversations in the breakfast nook at their farmhouse in Antella, Italy. Built in a circular space that had originally housed a brick oven, the nook overlooks the hills of Tuscany and spectacular sunsets.

Happy anniversary to George and Betty Woodman! They were married on this day in 1953. In this 1993 profile in the Daily Camera, “Boulder’s best known international couple least known in their hometown” reflects on their art and their shared commitment to it and each other.

Over summers spent in Antella, Italy, Betty Woodman often developed projects which could only be realized there. From 1998-2004, she collaborated with a pottery in Impruneta—a nearby town renowned for its terra cotta clay—enlivening their standard-issue garden planters with her vase-shaped façades and signature brushstrokes.

Betty Woodman in “Women’s Work,” Lyndhurst Mansion, Tarrytown, New York. On view through September 26, 2022.

Betty Woodman, life-long lover of flowers of all stripes, was born on this day in 1930. Happy birthday, Betty!

Spring flowers always remind us of Betty Woodman, and particularly her vases in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which greeted visitors to the museum with their bold colors, overlapping patterns and allusions to vases and gardens, holding an ever-changing display of seasonal blooms. They were installed on the occasion of her 2006 retrospective there—the first time the museum dedicated such an exhibition to a living woman artist.

Betty Woodman first traveled to Italy in 1951, on the suggestion of her friends Grace and John Tagliabue who invited her to join them there. She spent the year in Fiesole, renting a room on a hillside overlooking Florence and its Duomo and working in a pottery studio owned by painter Giorgio Ferrero and sculptor Lionello Fallacara.

In the 1960s, Betty Woodman worked primarily in stoneware at her studio in Boulder, Colorado. At that time, she focused on producing functional ceramics, keeping careful notes about each piece.

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.

Ryan Brady, Collections Manager: Betty Woodman was an artist whose pragmatism seemingly stood in contrast to the loose comfort of her artistic style, but those of us who knew her well understood this sensibility as an asset to her prolific output. She kept things. Her Wallpaper pieces, which I had the privilege of closely working with her on during my time as her studio assistant from 2011 until her passing in 2018, resulted from her instinct to put all her materials to use.

In the early 1980s, as Betty Woodman moved into a New York City loft with her husband, George Woodman, and began to shift her functional practice towards ceramic sculpture, she became friends with many artists deeply involved with the Pattern and Decoration movement. She collaborated with two of them: Joyce Kozloff and Cynthia Carlson.‍ With Kozloff, Woodman made ceramic forms—whether cups and saucers, pitchers or trays—which Kozloff then decorated with rich patterns inspired by Islamic tiles and motifs. The resulting works, which dissolve the line between craft and art, were shown in exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy Gallery and the Queens Museum in 1981.

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.