Betty Woodman

This ambitious exhibition, curated by Anna Katz, brings together American artists, including Betty Woodman, associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement in the first such comprehensive and scholarly survey. The exhibition showcases painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, installation and performance which embraced craft-based and decorative traditions and approached art-making from a sometimes dizzying appreciation of historic sources and feminist aesthetics.

The Woodman family’s lifelong love of Italy began in 1951 with Betty’s yearlong apprenticeship in Fiesole. After marrying in 1953, Betty and George took their young children, Charles and Francesca, for extended stays in 1959-60 and again in 1965-66.

"Let us celebrate!”—as George Woodman and friends did on this day in 1990, fêting Betty Woodman for her 60th birthday at their Chelsea loft.

As Betty wrote in this card from the '90s, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GEORGE! Pictured at the family’s Tuscan farmhouse, George happily shares space with two friendly doves, a thriving lemon tree, his sgraffito on the outdoor wall, and a good book. Betty’s photo, likely taken by George, captures the beauty of the beloved Italian landscape that informed his life and work for nearly 50 years.

In 1984, following a series of exhibitions at PS1 dedicated to “Art Couples,” art historian and critic Donald Kuspit organized "1 + 1 = 2" at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Manhattan. The exhibition paired the work of 31 artist couples and acknowledged a long-overdue cultural shift in recognizing women artists as peers to their male counterparts. Betty Woodman and George Woodman—included in the exhibition and married for more than thirty years at that point—often credited their mutual respect for and support of each other as artists as the bedrock of their marriage.

“Presenting Food,” 1985, marked Betty Woodman’s second project with the Fabric Workshop and Museum and a farewell to her work as a functional potter. For this dinner-performance event, held at the museum’s New York City gallery space, Woodman responded to chef Daniel Mattroce’s menu with her signature ceramic dinnerware and serving dishes, accompanied by fabrics she designed and printed at FWM’s Philadelphia studios. Woodman later recounted: “These are my last functional pieces, ‘presented’ like the food in an almost operatic finale.”

Hard/Cover looks at the interdisciplinary practice of three influential artists who participated in FWM's unique residency program, as well as five contemporary artists whose new works are equally informed by process and the intersection of ceramics and screen printing.

Osman Can Yerbekan looks back on 1984 Metropolis Magazine feature on Betty Woodman and George Woodman, linking the early influence of architecture on Betty’s ceramics to her legacy as a radical sculptor.

Betty Woodman in “Shapes from Out of Nowhere: Ceramics from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 29, 2021.

George Woodman and Betty Woodman began their nearly seven decade relationship in life and art in 1950. While Betty was on a year-long solo trip to Fiesole, Italy from 1951-52, the two regularly exchanged passionate love letters and affectionate notes.

Betty Abrahams Woodman was raised with her sister in Newton, Massachusetts by their “liberal, anti-religious and culturally ambitious” parents who fostered in their daughters the importance of responsibility and self-determination. This New Year’s card from the late 40s - early 50s reveals a young Betty with her family.

After acquiring a loft in New York City in 1980, Betty and George began to split their time between homes and studios in Manhattan, Boulder, Colorado and Antella, Italy—a way of living that became vital to their work. A 1984 feature on the couple in the magazine Metropolis chronicles their dynamic lives, relationship and art.