NOW ON VIEW “Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories” at Marian Goodman Gallery through December 23rd.

"While I was in Rome my Junior year I began to work with the ideas that presently occupy me,” Francesca Woodman wrote in 1980. “I also met a number of Italian artists who shared similar concerns in other mediums. In June we had a show at the Ugo Ferranti Gallery, my first exhibition in a prestigious gallery. That year I also showed at the Libreria Maldoror, a book store and gallery specializing in Futurist and Dada Literature. The owners introduced me to many rare books and writers, ets.”

Woodman arrived in Rome in 1977 to study in the RISD European Honors Program already fluent in Italian. This helped her integrate into the cultural life of the city and meet the painters Sabina Mirri and Giuseppe Gallo and other artists who worked out of studios in an abandoned pasta factory—the Pastificio Cerere. She also met Giuseppe Casetti and Paolo Missigoi, who owned the avant-garde Maldoror bookshop, a kind of Surrealist wunderkammer filled with literature, images and ephemera. Woodman adopted the Cerere as her own studio, working among her new friends and embracing its dilapidated but light-filled interiors to make some of her best-known photographs.

For more information on this exhibition, click here.

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