Francesca Woodman in “girls girls girls” at Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore, Ireland. On view April 2 through October 30, 2022. Curated by Simone Rocha.

Congratulations to Edwin Frank, Woodman Family Foundation Board member and longtime friend, on being honored with the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a distinguished poet, founder and editor of New York Review Books Classics, and editorial director of New York Review Books. Frank's fellow recipients of the Academy's highest honors for excellence in the arts this year are Adrienne Kennedy, Kara Walker, Anna Deveare Smith, and Phillip Lopate.

We are pleased to share “The Lady of the Glove: Francesca Woodman and Surrealism” by Celia Bùi Lê, who was our research intern this past summer through the Studio Institute. In her essay, Lê traces the history of Surrealism as related to women, both as maker and as muse, and discusses Woodman’s use of its tropes as a type of creative empowerment.

Betty Woodman first traveled to Italy in 1951, on the suggestion of her friends Grace and John Tagliabue who invited her to join them there. She spent the year in Fiesole, renting a room on a hillside overlooking Florence and its Duomo and working in a pottery studio owned by painter Giorgio Ferrero and sculptor Lionello Fallacara.

Although the Woodman Family Foundation archives are starting to take shape, there is still much more material to process before we are ready to open them up to scholars and researchers. Currently, we are processing George Woodman’s paper tiles and related plans, descriptions and documentation so that we can better understand this key aspect of his practice, which took his work with pattern off the canvas and into space and situation.

Francesca Woodman in “A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920-2020.” Whitechapel Gallery, London. February 24 through June 5, 2022.

In the 1960s, Betty Woodman worked primarily in stoneware at her studio in Boulder, Colorado. At that time, she focused on producing functional ceramics, keeping careful notes about each piece.

Forty-one years ago, 19 Artists—Emergent Americans was presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York featuring seven paintings by George Woodman, among work by eighteen of his contemporaries including Barbara Kruger, Guy de Cointet, and Manny Farber. The exhibition reflected curator Peter Frank’s desire to present the artists’ work as a series of small retrospectives. “What I have sought to assemble at the Guggenheim Museum is the skilled and confident visual articulation of engrossing ideas by individuals who have not been sufficiently recognized for their accomplishment,” he wrote.

Hi, this is Molly McBride Jacobson, archives intern at the Woodman Family Foundation. One of my projects has been inventorying, condensing, and rehousing Betty Woodman’s slide collection, which she used to document her work from the 1970s until the mid-2000s. She used this collection as a pre-digital database, arranging her slides by year and then separately by format.

Happy Valentine’s Day from the Woodman Family Foundation!

In the summer of 1954, recent college graduate George Woodman set out from Boston towards Albuquerque, New Mexico. He had a degree in philosophy, and a desire to study painting in a more concentrated way than he had been able to do as an undergraduate student supplementing his Harvard education with art courses at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He and Betty Woodman—who had been married just a year—followed this set of Triptik maps across the country, carefully tracking miles and expenses along the way until they arrived at the University of New Mexico.

Ryan Brady, Collections Manager: Betty Woodman was an artist whose pragmatism seemingly stood in contrast to the loose comfort of her artistic style, but those of us who knew her well understood this sensibility as an asset to her prolific output. She kept things. Her Wallpaper pieces, which I had the privilege of closely working with her on during my time as her studio assistant from 2011 until her passing in 2018, resulted from her instinct to put all her materials to use.