From the Archives

Francesca Woodman spent three weeks in July of 1980 on a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, surrounded by other artists, as well as musicians, poets, novelists and the forests of rural New Hampshire. She arrived there from New York, already thinking about trees.

For over fifty years, the Woodman family has enjoyed many meals and conversations in the breakfast nook at their farmhouse in Antella, Italy. Built in a circular space that had originally housed a brick oven, the nook overlooks the hills of Tuscany and spectacular sunsets.

Happy anniversary to George and Betty Woodman! They were married on this day in 1953. In this 1993 profile in the Daily Camera, “Boulder’s best known international couple least known in their hometown” reflects on their art and their shared commitment to it and each other.

Twenty-five years ago this month, George Woodman’s solo exhibition, "Pitti rivisatto," opened at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, and remained on view all summer long. His layered black and white photographs take this Renaissance palace as their subject, but also as an opportunity to reflect on time and the experiences carried within each viewer.

In the summer of 1978, Francesca Woodman’s photograph “Space 2” was featured in the Italian contemporary art magazine “Segno.” In the accompanying text, she explained that her original idea for the image came from her desire to illustrate literary metaphors but evolved over a group of photographs into a kind of story following a figure who explores these metaphors.

Over summers spent in Antella, Italy, Betty Woodman often developed projects which could only be realized there. From 1998-2004, she collaborated with a pottery in Impruneta—a nearby town renowned for its terra cotta clay—enlivening their standard-issue garden planters with her vase-shaped façades and signature brushstrokes.

Summertime is here again, and each year it has brought with it a fresh crop of summer group shows around New York City. Here’s one from 2014: George Woodman’s camera obscura photographs were included in “Contrapposto & Other Stories,” curated by Katia Rosenthal at Jeff Bailey Gallery in Chelsea.

Betty Woodman, life-long lover of flowers of all stripes, was born on this day in 1930. Happy birthday, Betty!

"At age fourteen I decided to become an artist, ambition enough for my life,” George Woodman once wrote. And over the next seven decades, he did just that, working fervently as a painter and photographer, and also as a writer and professor. Today, we celebrate George, who was born on this day in 1932!

Spring flowers always remind us of Betty Woodman, and particularly her vases in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which greeted visitors to the museum with their bold colors, overlapping patterns and allusions to vases and gardens, holding an ever-changing display of seasonal blooms. They were installed on the occasion of her 2006 retrospective there—the first time the museum dedicated such an exhibition to a living woman artist.

Fifty-two years ago this week would have been your last chance to see George Woodman’s solo exhibition at Spectrum Gallery in New York City. Woodman’s canvases and prints during this period were characterized by fields of interlocking, repetitive shapes, which, as Robert Berlind later described: “may be seen as a reprise of the transition earlier in the century from a still-descriptive cubism to a “purer” non-referentiality. These paintings are equally in keeping with the contemporaneous interests of Op Art and made a crucial contribution to the Criss-Cross movement which flourished in the 70’s in Boulder and had an impact on the New York scene.”

Born on this day in 1958 in Boulder, Colorado, Francesca Woodman lived and worked in Providence, Rhode Island, Rome and New York City. Here she is on a summer day at the Coney Island boardwalk.