Francesca Woodman

Published in May 2025, the anthology "Parentheses of Reception" explores how the parenthesis, a rhetorical figure of speech and thought, can offer fresh insights into classical reception studies by conceptualizing Greco-Roman antiquity as being both “inserted into” and “remaining apart” from the present.

Hi! I'm Ambar Vasquez-Mitra, a recent graduate from Middlebury College with a BA in History and Museum Studies and part of the Studio Institute Arts Intern Program. As this year's summer research intern at the Woodman Family Foundation, I've been tasked with organizing and compiling enhanced information on the numerous exhibitions of Francesca Woodman’s work over the past forty years.

This Art Basel, visit the Kunstmuseum Basel to see Francesca Woodman’s photographs featured in "Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture."

Works by Francesca Woodman are currently on view in two museum exhibitions about Surrealism and photography's relationship with truth at the Moderna Museet and Norton Museum of Art, respectively.

Thrilled to announce that the Art Institute of Chicago has acquired 30 important lifetime works by Francesca Woodman from the Foundation’s holdings. With the breadth and depth of this acquisition, the Art Institute now owns the largest institutional collection of the artist’s lifetime works and has become a major center for its preservation and public display.

In "Gestures: A Body of Work," first published this year, editors Alice Butler, Nell Osborne, and Hilary White compile a series of essays which explore embodied, affective, and political gesture in feminist art and writing. In her own contribution to the collection, Butler delves into the ways Woodman uses textiles in her photographs and their relationship to bodies and touch.

Betty Woodman and George Woodman are often celebrated for their exuberant use of color, while Francesca Woodman is best known for her dramatic black-and-white photographs, filled with shades of grey. Working across different mediums and methods, the Woodman artists used white—and the absence of color—to fascinating effects.

Thrilled to announce our partnership with NYFA on the inaugural WOODMAN FAMILY FOUNDATION HOUSING STABILITY GRANT for ARTISTS (WFF HSG). In recognition of the increasing unaffordability of rental housing in New York City and the housing insecurity it creates for artists, we 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.

The Woodman Family Foundation archive was delighted to host students from the Art Documentation class in the Pratt School of Information’s MSLIS program on November 18. Professor Cristina Pattuelli, consulting archivist Sewon Kang, and the students joined us to survey of some of the archives highlights and have an engaging discussion on the unique opportunities and challenges the Woodman Family archives have.

In 1972, Francesca Woodman received her first camera, a 6x6 twin-lens reflex Yashica Mat-124G, from her father, George Woodman.

This fall, check out two group exhibitions showcasing works by Francesca Woodman. Known for her performative approach to photography, Woodman stages the female body and intervenes in the environment to create narratives rich in metaphor.