Betty Woodman

Excerpt from the documentary “Betty Woodman: Thinking Out Loud,” 1991 © Charles Woodman.

Of this group of works from the 1990s, many not seen for decades, Johanna Fateman wrote in her recent review in The New Yorker: “As with everything on view in this wonderful show, the installation is so gestural and so fluid that it’s easy to forget that the ecstatic whole is composed of brittle parts.”

‍The Balustrade Relief Vases, which Betty Woodman began making in the 1990s, were a turning point in her work, in which she fully embraced the space and concerns of painting, through sculptural materials.

Please join us at 7 PM on Thursday, December 8, 2022 at SculptureCenter for Amy Sherlock and Judith Tannenbaum on Betty Woodman, a conversation discussing the artist’s life and work during the 1990s, a crucial period in her career.

Betty Woodman began her career as a potter, inspired by a Bauhaus ethos to make beautiful objects for people to use in their daily lives. By 1980, when she and her husband George Woodman—a painter and photographer—purchased the New York City loft where they lived and worked for part of each year until the end of their lives, she had already begun moving away from the purely functional concerns of ceramics.

The 1990s was a career-defining period for Betty Woodman in which her work in ceramic declared itself as painting and sculpture through her radical formal innovations. This shift was affirmed by contemporary art critics, who increasingly discussed her work in relation to sculpture and painting of the day.

Betty Woodman’s touring exhibition which began at the Stedelijk in 1996 also included another major work: “House of the South” (1994-1996). Measuring more than 13 feet high by more than 20 feet wide, this ambitious frieze evolved from Woodman’s “Balustrade Relief Vase” series begun earlier in the decade, here incorporating multiple three-dimensional vases atop ceramic shelves, surrounded by flat ceramic relief elements implying architecture, plants and other vessels.

‍In September of 1996, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam opened “Betty Woodman,” a major exhibition of the artist’s work and her largest in Europe at that point. The works on view included two installations—“Women at the Fountain” (1992) and “Conversations on the Shore” (1994)—in which Woodman for the first time combined free-standing vases on the floor with an array of wall-mounted vases and flat ceramic elements.

This major solo exhibition—the first of the artist’s work in New York in six years—brings together a group of ceramic sculptures from a critical and career-defining period in Woodman’s practice.

We’re thrilled that RISD Museum has acquired a group of important works by Betty, Francesca, and George Woodman from the Foundation’s holdings through a combination of museum funds and Foundation gifts.

Betty Woodman in “Women’s Work,” Lyndhurst Mansion, Tarrytown, New York. On view through September 26, 2022.

"The Flames" takes a transhistorical approach to ceramics to assert the critical relationship of clay to both art and humankind. The exhibition combines ancient objects dating back to the Neolithic with those made by contemporary artists—including Betty Woodman—and everything in between.