“Presenting Food,” 1985, marked Betty Woodman’s second project with the Fabric Workshop and Museum and a farewell to her work as a functional potter. For this dinner-performance event, held at the museum’s New York City gallery space, Woodman responded to chef Daniel Mattroce’s menu with her signature ceramic dinnerware and serving dishes, accompanied by fabrics she designed and printed at FWM’s Philadelphia studios. Woodman later recounted: “These are my last functional pieces, ‘presented’ like the food in an almost operatic finale.”

Hard/Cover looks at the interdisciplinary practice of three influential artists who participated in FWM's unique residency program, as well as five contemporary artists whose new works are equally informed by process and the intersection of ceramics and screen printing.

Francesca Woodman was born on this day in 1958. Her artist parents used this drawing by George, recently discovered in the family archive, to share the good news with family and friends.

PLOTLINE 5 considers the performative aspects of Francesca Woodman’s practice. In her photographs and videos, Woodman claimed the female body as subject by using her own - staging and sequencing its movements, capturing it in motion. The bodily, temporal, and spatial concerns in Woodman’s work align her with the feminist performance art of her time. Woodman’s photographs reveal traces of her carefully constructed performative process.

Katy Hessel of The Great Women Artists Podcast interviews Katarina Jerinic, the Woodman Family Foundation’s Collections Curator, on Francesca Woodman’s work and life. The two discuss photographs made in Providence, Italy and New York and Jerinic shares some of Woodman’s own words and ideas found in the Foundation's archives.

Osman Can Yerbekan looks back on 1984 Metropolis Magazine feature on Betty Woodman and George Woodman, linking the early influence of architecture on Betty’s ceramics to her legacy as a radical sculptor.

George Woodman’s landscape paintings from the early 1960s were influenced by modernists from Cézanne to Diebenkorn and profoundly impacted by his year-long stay in Italy. “The landscape in Italy is not the same. Italy is not a natural object. The earth is shaped. The hillsides are terraced…I painted many more Italian landscapes in Boulder than I ever did in Italy."

Betty Woodman in “Shapes from Out of Nowhere: Ceramics from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 29, 2021.

Francesca Woodman's love of dessert was well-known to her family and friends, often coming up in letters or conversations, and even in two paintings she made in the late 1970s.

George Woodman and Betty Woodman began their nearly seven decade relationship in life and art in 1950. While Betty was on a year-long solo trip to Fiesole, Italy from 1951-52, the two regularly exchanged passionate love letters and affectionate notes.

Betty Abrahams Woodman was raised with her sister in Newton, Massachusetts by their “liberal, anti-religious and culturally ambitious” parents who fostered in their daughters the importance of responsibility and self-determination. This New Year’s card from the late 40s - early 50s reveals a young Betty with her family.

From his early abstract paintings to more recent painted photographs, color was a powerful and continuous thread in George Woodman’s work. Even as his focus shifted to black and white photography, Woodman never abandoned his interest in color, instead finding ways to create unexpected dialogues between and across media.