Exhibition

This ambitious survey of recent feminist practices in contemporary art begins with Lucy Lippard’s observation that feminist art is “a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life.” While the majority of works on view were made in the first two decades of this century, highlighting the wide-ranging concerns and multiple perspectives of contemporary artists, influential works made by artists of earlier generations are also featured, including three photographs by Francesca Woodman.

We are pleased to announce that this exhibition includes a selection of correspondence written between Betty, Francesca and George Woodman in 1978, as well as Francesca Woodman’s “Selected Video Works,” 1976-1978.

LAST CHANCE TO SEE Francesca Woodman in Rincontrarsi a Venezia at Spazio Berlendis, Venice, Italy. On view through July 17, 2021.

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.

George Woodman’s exhibition at the Boulder Center for the Visual Arts in the fall of 1981 was a survey of his various approaches to pattern over 15 years, ranging from his complex tessellations, to the use of pattern to unify a surface, to a rigorous examination of the decorative, and finally to the all-encompassing perceptual experience of his room-scaled paper tile installations.

The Addison has a long and important history with Francesca Woodman. It was the first institution to collect her work, purchasing six of her photographs in 1976. She had her first solo exhibition there that same year, including works she made while studying at Rhode Island School of Design.

Francesca Woodman’s graduate exhibition as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design was held at the school’s Woods-Gerry Gallery in November 1978. She considered it a “swan song” to her time there as shown in her photocopied invitation. She reported on the opening in a letter to her friend Edith Schloss: “you would have enjoyed it i bought all these bird whistles that one fills with water and they warble in n.y. do you remember them from when you used to live there? anyway the room was very echoey with these things and i actually enjoyed the opening.”

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.

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.

LAST CHANCE to see Francesca Woodman in "The Body Electric" at the National Gallery of Australia!