Acquisition by the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, 2024
We are very pleased to announce the acquisition of a group of important works by Betty Woodman, Francesca Woodman, and George Woodman from the Foundation’s holdings by the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire.
New Hampshire and the Currier hold a place of significance for the Woodman family. George Woodman was born and raised in Concord, deciding to become an artist while attending painting classes at the Manchester Art Institute as a teen. Francesca Woodman was awarded a residency at MacDowell which served as an inspiring setting for her work. And Betty Woodman was the subject of a two-person exhibition at the museum in 2023, the first in their "Distant Conversations" series.
The acquisition includes one of the earliest examples of George Woodman's distinctive move to pattern painting realized after an influential year spent in Italy and studying Islamic and Romanesque tile patterns in the mid-1960s; the complete set of lifetime prints from Francesca Woodman’s After My Grandmother’s Funeral series, photographed in 1977 in the house where George grew up; and Athens, an ambitiously-scaled triptych by Betty Woodman in which she synthesized sculpture, painting and art history across the ceramic façades of a trio of vessels.