Betty Woodman

Curated by Glenn Adamson and Severin Delfs, “Drop, Cloth” traces a 50-year lineage of draping in contemporary art. As Delfs explains, drapery is presented here "as a flexible visual language that connects perception to material form,” explored through approaches that are “diaphanous and ephemeral," "material and sculptural," and "pictorial and painterly.”

Thrilled to announce that “Betty Woodman: Conversations on the Shore, Works from the 1990s”—the exhibition catalogue designed by Laura Coombs for Woodman’s 2022 solo show at David Kordansky Gallery—has been named a Winner of AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers of 2024.

The first round of funds have officially been sent to recipients of the inaugural WFF Housing Stability Grant for Artists (WFF HSG)!

Curated by potter, interior designer, and author Jonathan Adler, this vibrant exhibition at MAD brings together over 60 works from the museum’s permanent collection, juxtaposed with Adler’s own iconic designs.

In honor of International Museum Day this past week, our Collections Coordinator Celia Lê visited AMOCA, where Betty Woodman’s "Pillow Pitcher" is on view alongside works by Ron Nagle, Paul Soldner, Peter Voulkos, among others in "Hot! & Ready to Serve."

On a trip to South Korea in 2001, Betty Woodman was introduced to the Joseon Dynasty folk art (minhwa)—with motifs like vibrant scenes of peonies and lotuses. With these paintings in mind, she started a new series of wall-based works titled “Ceramic Pictures of Korean Paintings,” which she first showed at the Daum Museum in 2002 as a five-panel mural.

In recognition of the increasing unaffordability of rental housing in New York City and the housing insecurity it creates for artists, WFF will award grants of $30,000—distributed over three years—to five visual artists with the goal of improving their housing stability.

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.

Betty Woodman's eclecticism reflects a wide array of influences, including those from modernist French painters like Gauguin, Bonnard, and Matisse. Yet Woodman’s connection to Matisse transcends their shared use of vivid, exuberant colors. Both artists indulged in decorative impulses through their inventive use of positive and negative space.

Over the past few months, the Foundation delved into Betty Woodman's and George Woodman’s personal library as part of our ongoing work to build a study center. Betty Woodman’s books on Japanese textiles and woodblock prints, in particular, are extensively bookmarked, with pages cut and ripped away by the artist. She often amassed many of these books on her travels regardless of whether she could read the language, choosing instead to let the images weave themselves into her visual lexicon.

This month, explore two group exhibitions in New York showcasing diverse works by Betty Woodman from the 1990s and 2000s.

This solo presentation of wall-based works by Woodman focuses on the culminating phase of her 60-year career. The paintings on view--on canvas, ceramic, and paper--illuminate the artist's daring approach to materials and radical explorations of two- and three-dimensional form.