From the Archives

Francesca Woodman often used the backs of her photographs to write letters to family and friends, addressing, stamping and dropping her prints directly into the mailbox. In this exchange between her and George from April 1977, they discuss her first forays into fashion photography and other news from Providence and Boulder.

After acquiring a loft in New York City in 1980, Betty and George began to split their time between homes and studios in Manhattan, Boulder, Colorado and Antella, Italy—a way of living that became vital to their work. A 1984 feature on the couple in the magazine Metropolis chronicles their dynamic lives, relationship and art.

A former wine cellar underneath the family's stone farmhouse in Antella, Italy was transformed in to a new photography and painting studio for George Woodman, with surrounding views of the Tuscan countryside.

Betty Woodman’s "Chinese Pleasure" (2007-2008) was commissioned by the U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies Program for the United States Embassy in Beijing. Woodman was inspired by and freely borrowed from visual influences all over the world and throughout art history, here incorporating three distinct moments in the history of Chinese art, ranging from Sichuan bronzes to popular culture into this dramatic installation.

From 1972-1973, Francesca Woodman studied at Abbot Academy, one of the few high schools in the US at the time to offer a concentrated art program. It was there that Francesca met Wendy Snyder MacNeil, her earliest, highly influential teacher who introduced her to the creative and expressive capabilities of photography.

In 1960, after returning to Boulder, Colorado, from their first year together in Italy, the Woodman family moved into the Sirotkin House. One of more than a dozen modernist homes in Boulder by architect Tician Papachristou, the house was designed for the original owner as a pair with the house next door.

George Woodman’s "The Rochester Carpet" was a sprawling, patterned mosaic temporarily covering the floor of the Bevier Gallery at Rochester Institute of Technology in December of 1984. This site-specific work was just one of the artist’s ambitious and encompassing tile projects, extending his earlier practice as an abstract painter by employing complex systems of pattern and color across public spaces.

In 1987, Betty Woodman began her work at the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, as an artist invited by the French Ministry of Culture. Over the course of more than twenty years, she made a series of sculptural vases and cups and saucers in brilliantly decorated porcelain, later shown at the Palazzo Pitti in her adopted home city of Florence.

In the spring of 1980, Francesca Woodman’s "Blueprint for a Temple (II)" was included in the exhibition "Beyond Photography 80" at the Alternative Museum in New York City.

Beginning in 1965, Betty, George, Charlie and Francesca Woodman spent an influential year together as a family in Italy, immersed in museums, art, and culture. Their affinity for Florence took root, leading to the acquisition of a farmhouse in Antella several years later that has served as a family and creative nucleus ever since.

During his 2004 residency at Grand Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, George Woodman continued his work with one-of-a-kind, large-scale still life photographs, made using a camera obscura.

Betty Woodman's exhibition in the Matrix series at Wadsworth Atheneum in 1992 helped to define a context for her work in ceramics within the larger world of contemporary art, highlighting "that Woodman sees herself ‘dealing with painting as much as with sculpture.'"