Exhibition

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.

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.”

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!

LAST CHANCE to see Francesca Woodman: New York Works in Venice this week! On view through Saturday, December 12, 2020 at Victoria Miro Venice.

Betty Woodman’s Chinese Pleasure (2007-2008) was commissioned by the U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies Program for the United States Embassy in Beijing. Woodman was inspired by and freely borrowed from visual influences all over the world and throughout art history, here incorporating three distinct moments in the history of Chinese art, ranging from Sichuan bronzes to popular culture into this dramatic installation.

This exhibition centers on a rare series of color photographs that Francesca Woodman staged in her New York apartment in 1979.

The catalogue for Pattern, Crime & Decoration—a two-part exhibition at MAMCO, Geneva and Le Consortium, Dijon —focuses on the work of artists associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement in the US. It includes paintings by George Woodman and wall-based ceramic sculptures by Betty Woodman.