Francesca Woodman

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.

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.

"Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories" presents over forty photographs which focus on the varied thought processes, interests, and influences that inspired Woodman's work, many of which have never before been seen. The catalogue highlights previously unexplored relational contexts and includes a newly commissioned essay by critic and novelist Chris Kraus.

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 perfomative 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.

Read a review on "Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories" by Justin Kamp in The Art Newspaper. The exhibition is currently on view through December 23.

Francesca Woodman’s contact sheets are revealing about her process, demonstrating ways that ideas took shape as she explored and realized them while printing. Each contact sheet has at least a half a dozen frames trying to work out what the right composition should be for a particular photograph. Here she experiments with a variety of compositions and poses, concerned with juxtaposing various patterns, fabrics and the body.

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, Isolde Brielmaier, Deputy Director of the New Museum and the Curator-at-Large at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, shares her thoughts on Woodman’s use of the body and the nude in her highly crafted photographs.

Read a review on "Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories" by Andrew Dickson in BBC Culture. The exhibition is currently on view through December 23.

Francesca Woodman was well-acquainted with the traditions of Classical Western art and representations of the figure within it, which seeped into her own picture-making. While perhaps better-known for her photographs of the full female body—she specified that she used nudes “in an ironic sense like classical painting nudes"—Woodman returned again and again to highly composed glimpses of hands and feet.