Exhibition

Francesca Woodman in “A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920-2020.” Whitechapel Gallery, London. February 24 through June 5, 2022.

Forty-one years ago, "19 Artists—Emergent Americans" was presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York featuring seven paintings by George Woodman, among work by eighteen of his contemporaries including Barbara Kruger, Guy de Cointet, and Manny Farber. The exhibition reflected curator Peter Frank’s desire to present the artists’ work as a series of small retrospectives. “What I have sought to assemble at the Guggenheim Museum is the skilled and confident visual articulation of engrossing ideas by individuals who have not been sufficiently recognized for their accomplishment,” he wrote.

Read a review on "Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories" by Andrew Dickson in BBC Culture.

Read a review on "Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories" by Justin Kamp in The Art Newspaper.

On the occasion of "Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories," Marian Goodman Gallery commissioned eight video vignettes by an array of art historians, curators, and artists, each whom brought their own perspective to Woodman’s work and the exhibition currently on view. In this video, Elisabeth Sussman, the Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, contextualizes Woodman's work within the framework of its era.

On the occasion of "Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories," Marian Goodman Gallery commissioned eight video vignettes by an array of art historians, curators, and artists, each whom brought their own perspective to Woodman’s work and the exhibition currently on view. In this video, Kevin Moore, a New York based curator and writer, on Woodman's Victorian aesthetic, identity exploration and the artist's role in her artistic narrative.

On the occasion of "Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories," Marian Goodman Gallery commissioned eight video vignettes by an array of art historians, curators, and artists, each whom brought their own perspective to Woodman’s work and the exhibition currently on view. In this video, Drew Sawyer, the Brooklyn Museum's Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator, discusses Woodman's historical references and artistic affinities among her and her peers.

On the occasion of "Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories," Marian Goodman Gallery commissioned eight video vignettes by an array of art historians, curators, and artists, each whom brought their own perspective to Woodman’s work and the exhibition currently on view. In this video, Chris Kraus, the American critic and writer, talks through Francesca Woodman's artistic process.

Watch the “Alternate Stories: Francesca Woodman” panel event hosted by The Brooklyn Rail in conjunction with the exhibition closing tomorrow at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. A conversation featuring Katarina Jerinic, Corey Keller, Lissa McClure, Elisabeth Sussman, and Lyle Rexer.

On the occasion of “Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories,” Marian Goodman Gallery commissioned eight video vignettes by an array of art historians, curators, and artists, each whom brought their own perspective to Woodman’s work and the exhibition currently on view. In this video, Rosalind Krauss, art critic and theorist and Columbia University professor, discusses her initial responses to Woodman’s photographs when co-curating the retrospective exhibition at Hunter and Wellesley Colleges in 1986. She advocates for the formal power and intelligence of Woodman’s work, then and still today.

Francesca Woodman’s engagement with the figure was not only connected to re-interpretations of classical art, but also reflective of the art of her time. In the 1970s—when Woodman made much of her work as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design—artists from Hannah Wilke to Bruce Nauman were concerned with representations of the body and self, stemming from wide-ranging concerns about its relationship to cultural and physical space. Here Woodman uses the shroud—as plaster cast or embroidered sheet—in two series’ of images to alternately hide and reveal the figure’s form, in both sculptural and performative ways.

On the occasion of “Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories,” Marian Goodman Gallery commissioned eight video vignettes by an array of art historians, curators, and artists, each whom brought their own perspective to Woodman’s work and the exhibition currently on view. In this video, Sabina Mirri, Italian artist and close friend of Woodman, shares her memories and impressions of Woodman as a singular, compelling young woman and artist during her time in Rome.