Recent, Current & Upcoming
In 1987, Betty Woodman was invited by the French Ministry of Culture to participate in an artist residency at the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, just outside of Paris. She worked there off and on more than twenty years, producing brilliantly decorated and fantastically formed works with the same materials, glazes and techniques used to produce the famed 18th century Sèvres porcelain tableware and vases used by French nobility.
In 2010, Woodman’s Sèvres porcelain works were presented alongside historic examples in the collection of the Museo delle Porcellane di Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Italy, shown in a magnificent pink and green building, reached through the Boboli Gardens and perfectly suited to Woodman’s aesthetic.
As critic and friend Ida Panicelli describes in the exhibition catalogue: “Her mode might be considered postmodern in its capacity to conjoin subjects and signs from the past, to articulate them in unexpected and original fashion in a contemporary language. She draws from both decorative and artistic languages, from ceramics traditions and from the masters of modernism. Her dishes colored with small brushstrokes might have been used by Bonnard’s women, her bright flower vases could have been painted by Matisse in one of his interiors, and surely Queen Marie Antoinette (at least as she is described in Sofia Coppola’s recent film) would have been crazy about Woodman’s delicate gold-and-pink Sèvres coffee cups.
“And yet her works are without precedent. ‘Philosophical objects, vibrant with contradictions,’ as Peter Schjeldahl calls them, they fail to fit within any defined genre, and indeed become a genre unto themselves, unmistakeably à la Woodman.“
Click on the image above for a complete gallery view and details.
In the spring of 1980, Francesca Woodman’s Blueprint for a Temple was included in Beyond Photography at the Alternative Museum in New York. Shown here is a portion of her original installation made from photographs projected onto architectural blueprint paper along with her sketches and pages from the exhibition catalogue. The Temple is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's permanent collection.
“This grand fifteen by ten foot collage of blueprints brings together details from New York bathrooms of a century ago— decorative tiles, details of fixtures, that echo classical motifs—with grand female figures—caryatids. The bathroom details were closely observed at friends’ apartments. The exalted caryatids were her friends posed in New York. But she had experienced at first hand the sublime caryatids of the Erectheum on the Acropolis in Athens when she was about sixteen years old,” wrote George Woodman in 2012. He often recounted the story of helping Francesca move this massive piece to Tribeca and back again, rolled up tightly and ushered onto the New York City subway between rush-hours.
As Francesca wrote on one of her blueprints:
Blueprint for a Temple
For a temple of contemplative classical proportions made out of classically inspired fragments of its modern day counterpart the bathroom
Bathrooms with classical inspiration are often found in the most squalid and chaotic parts of the city. They offer a note of calm and peacefulness like their temple counterparts offered to wayfarers in Ancient Greece
Click on the image above for a complete gallery view and details.
The Woodmans made their second sojourn to Italy as a family from 1965-1966. They spent the year near Florence, as they had in 1959, and as Betty had when she traveled there solo in 1951.
Betty—on a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship—explored the traditions and techniques of Italian ceramics through a series of vases inspired by Etruscan pottery. George—on a Faculty Fellowship from University of Colorado—began a series of paintings based on patterns in 13th century floor mosaics while working from a studio in a 16th century building, surrounded by casts of the Parthenon. They rented a guest house filled with mosaic tiles and Arabic decor on the grounds of the Villa Fioravanti outside Florence, where the eccentric owner raised exotic birds that roamed the grounds. Francesca and Charlie attended Scuola-Città Pestalozzi, a local public school centered on social equity and community, and began to learn their way in Italian. As a family, they visited museums together and spent the year immersed in Italian culture and cooking. This influential experience ultimately led to their purchase two years later of a farmhouse in Antella, just outside of Florence, that would become a focal point for the family and their art over the next five decades.
Click on the image above for a complete gallery view and details.
The catalogue for Pattern, Crime & Decoration—a two-part exhibition at MAMCO, Geneva in 2018 and Le Consortium, Dijon in 2019—has been published and is now available for purchase. The exhibitions and catalogue consider the achievements of artists associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement in the United States and ways that their work celebrated decorative and non-Western visual motifs. Included are paintings by George Woodman from the 1970s which embrace color, pattern and beauty while adhering to the rigorous tenets of minimalism as well as later sculptures by Betty Woodman which reflect the enduring influence of this groundbreaking movement.
To order your copy, click here.
Click on the image above for a complete gallery view and details.
From 1995-2015, Grand Arts in Kansas City, Missouri supported the experimental projects of more than 120 American and international artists from concept to realization with research, development, residencies and exhibitions. In 2004, George Woodman and the organization’s team built a camera obscura in a studio there so that he could continue his work with one-of-a-kind, large-scale still life photographs. He originally began this series in 1992 as he transitioned to photography after working primarily as a painter. “This way of working is congenial to an artist who has always been a painter and started with still life over 50 years ago. I like the hands-on procedure of planning and building the still life, making tests and revisions and finally processing the final unique image with my own hands. With no intermediate step of film developing and printing, the images are created by a seamless uninterrupted process entirely under the control of my eye and hand.”
“The camera obscura, first instrument of verisimilitude, is in George Woodman's hands an implement of deepest dreaminess,” wrote Nancy Princenthal in the essay that accompanied his resulting exhibition. “Working with a process of his own invention, Woodman creates big black and white photographs that are part photo collage, part shadow play, and part art history lecture as narrated by a lyric poet. The photographs begin with the composition of a still life involving objects and images, usually including Woodman's own photographs, often of other art. The arrangement is set up in front of the lens of a camera obscura built inside the studio. Within the camera (which is, of course, just a lightless room with a small hole in one wall, fitted with a lens), a big sheet of photographic paper is fastened to an easel. When the shutter is open, the still life registers on the paper as an inverted negative image. Woodman develops the print in the camera, applying the chemicals with sponges. Sometimes he includes negative images in the still lifes, which revert to positive when re-photographed. Long exposures - generally eight to ten minutes - allow objects to be moved while being photographed, creating transparencies and ghosts. The interchanges between positive and negative, art and its double, first, second and third orders of experience, and - perhaps most to the point -frailty and immortality are the murmurous heartbeat of this work.”
Click on the image above for a complete gallery view and details.
“Betty Woodman / MATRIX 119” at Wadsworth Atheneum in 1992 was a key exhibition for Woodman, helping to define a context for her work in ceramics within the larger world of contemporary art. The MATRIX exhibition series has been a critical forum for challenging, experimental contemporary art for the past 45 years, presenting early-career solo exhibitions for many accomplished and well-known artists.
In the exhibition essay, curator Andrea Miller-Keller writes: “Woodman’s work has been hailed for crossing over from ceramics to sculpture. It is important to acknowledge, however, that Woodman sees herself ‘dealing with painting as much as with sculpture. That is really what ceramics is all about. It’s about form and about painting and about painted three-dimensional form.’ A dynamic tension common to ceramics (and only occasionally present in sculpture) arises from the fact that painting stresses flatness while a clay form is volumetric. Woodman energetically exploits this contradiction in her recent work…”
To read the entire essay, please click here or click on the image above for a complete gallery view and details. Please click here to read a contemporaneous review which describes Woodman's “sculpturelike clay pieces” as “exuding the vigor and freedom of abstract expressionist paintings.”
Please click on image for a complete gallery view of six postcards.
Not long after Francesca Woodman arrived in Rome in 1977 as part of RISD’s European Honors Program, she discovered the surrealist bookshop Maldoror and befriended its two owners, Giuseppe (Cristiano) Casetti and Paolo Missigoi. There she met many Roman artists, including Sabina Mirri and other painters working at the old Cerere pasta factory, where she later made many of her most iconic Italian photographs.
Woodman made unique, individual postcards as invitations to her show in the basement of Maldoror, her first solo exhibition in Europe. “At her opening at ‘Maldoror’ she did not appear,” wrote painter, critic and friend Edith Schloss. ”We waited for her in vain. Who ever heard of an artist not showing up at their own opening, specially their first? Later that night I found her on my stairs with wet eyes but already smiling, so that I would not reproach her for her lack of professionalism.“
Schloss reviewed the exhibition enthusiastically, writing in the International Herald Tribune:
“This young American photographer, who is also a painter, said she wanted to catch with photography that which cannot be caught any other way. And she expresses the evanescent and movement in consistent and [un]usually evocative small images which travel beyond ordinary photography. At times she used her own nude body—jumping, curling up or just pigeon-footedly standing next to eels or other slithering things—but without a trace of eroticism or narcissism. All the photographs are fresh, the earliest ones relying on pattern, but the latest stark and open.“
RE-OPENED: extended through July 4, 2021
Dallas Museum of Art
www.dma.org
Virtual exhibition now on view: https://virtual.dma.org/dreamer-of-houses/
This exhibition of works from the museum’s collection immerses viewers in ways that our homes and private spaces reflect and represent our desires, values and selves. Included is Betty Woodman’s The Red Table (2014) from her series of “paintings” which present complex and imaginative illusions of domestic space in canvas, ceramic, paint and wood.
RE-OPENED: extended through December, 2020
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
www.imj.org.il
View the exhibition online including a virtual tour with curator Adina Kamien-Kazhdan: https://www.imj.org.il/en/exhibitions/bodyscapes
Bodyscapes brings together works from nearly 3000 years ago to today which consider the aspects of the human body and its relationship to the larger world. The exhibition includes a section on the Human Landscape which specifically explores shifting representations of the female body and nature and features a group of photographs by Francesca Woodman.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue.
RE-OPENED: extended through February, 2022
Whitney Museum of American Art
www.whitney.org
Drawn from works in the museum’s collection, this survey explores ways that artists have drawn on the materials and methods of craft. The exhibition takes a historical perspective, spanning 70 years of creative output by artists, including a range of works by Betty Woodman from her ground-breaking Joined Vases (1972), an early example of her push beyond production pottery while still embracing it as subject matter, to her ambitious and animated Still Life Vase #11 (1990).
LAST CHANCE to see Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel in Berlin this week! On view through Saturday, September 5, 2020 at C/O Berlin. Click here for more information.
Betty Woodman is widely known for her seven-decade, groundbreaking engagement with clay, in particular her deconstruction and re-framing of the classical vase. In the early 1980s, Woodman embarked on architectural investigations that combined ceramic sculpture with vividly colored and patterned elements. These works are lyrical illusions of space and scale, influenced by Italian architecture from the Roman, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. Woodman's dynamic takes on colonnades, courtyards, rooms, walls, windows (and yes, vases) oscillate between form and function, two- and three-dimensionality. In these inspired and ambitious works, ceramic is both an embellishment of architecture and the means through which to represent it. Click here to view the series.
RE-OPENED: extended through August 30, 2020
Guildhall Art Gallery, London
guildhall.cityoflondon.gov.uk
This exhibition challenges a popular trope in 19th Century painting in which women were often depicted as ornamental objects confined to interior spaces, and instead foregrounds ways in which female artists resist or appropriate these conventions to their own ends. Historically significant paintings by Edward Burne-Jones and John Frederick Lewis as well as their contemporaries Emma Sandys and Evelyn De Morgan tie these representations to more recent works that reconsider the implications of such spaces. The multiple photographs from Francesca Woodman’s House series included here alternately suggest entrapment or escape.
The exhibition was curated by and first presented at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
NOW OPEN: June 22, 2020 through January 26, 2021
National Gallery of Australia
nga.gov.au
The Body Electric brings together artworks concerned with sex, pleasure and desire by a generational cross-section of women artists, including Francesca Woodman, whose work has rarely been shown in Australia. A suite of Woodman’s intimate black and white photographs interrogate representations of femininity, and are shown alongside other pioneering works in photography and video which explore ways that sex, love and loss are an animating part of the human experience.
RE-OPENED: extended through September 5, 2020
C/O Berlin
www.co-berlin.org
Opened in March, just before the Covid-19 pandemic closed museums internationally, Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel, a solo exhibition at C/O Berlin Foundation, has recently re-opened and been extended through September 5, 2020.
In the first major institutional exhibition of Francesca Woodman’s work in Germany in more than 25 years, C/O Berlin Foundation presents 102 photographs ranging from small-scale gelatin silver prints to architecturally-scaled caryatids and other diazotypes, along with a selection of video works. This comprehensive survey of Francesca Woodman’s oeuvre thematically approaches photographs from all periods in her short but productive career, showcasing some of her best-known works, presenting series of images in full, and highlighting other works which have been rarely seen.
The exhibition was organized by Anna Tellgren, Curator of Photography at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden where it originated (2015). It then traveled to Foam, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2016); Fondation Henri Cartier Bresson, Paris, France (2016); Moderna Museet, Malmo, Sweden (2017); Finnish Museum of Photography (2017); and Fundacion Canal, Madrid, Spain (2019).
A fully-illustrated exhibition catalogue—published in English, Swedish, French and Spanish—includes essays by Anna-Karin Palm, Anna Tellgren and George Woodman.
RE-OPENED: extended through September 27, 2020
CaixaForum, Barcelona
www.caixaforum.es
CaixaForum, Barcelona presents Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design, 1924-Today, recently re-opened and extended. This comprehensive exhibition juxtaposes Surrealist artworks and design objects, revealing ways that this provocative art movement influenced design, fashion and photography over the past 100 years. Major artworks from Surrealism’s seminal period in the first half of the 20th Century are included, along with Francesca Woodman’s photograph A Woman; A Mirror; A Woman is a Mirror for a Man (circa 1975-1978), highlighting the influence of Surrealism on Woodman’s practice and its relationship to gender representation and identity.
This exhibition was organized by and first presented at Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany (2019) and is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue.
Beginning his career in the 1950s as an abstract painter, by the mid 1960s George Woodman turned his focus to geometric abstractions grounded in complex patterned systems and rigorous formal structures. His exploration of pattern, in varied articulations, continued through the next two decades. Click here to view the series.
Today we celebrate what would have been Betty and George Woodman’s 67th wedding anniversary. This exceptional pair reflected on their long partnership in a 2008 interview:
George: I think marriage is something we tend to take for granted, like breathing air or drinking water.
Betty: All those years of friendship and at this point, shared memories… and obviously 55 years of being together with the same person means knowing that person. I think part of our being able to last this long together is that we can still surprise each other in our responses to things. But we can also trust each other. And we can listen to each other. We still have things to say to each other.
George: We have a lot to say to each other. There are a lot of couples who’ve been married to each other for [a] long time – they’re in the same space, but they’re not together. They ignore each other in their way.
Betty: We ignore each other – we’re not always on top of each other, we think sometimes too much on top of each other. We have parts of ourselves that are private, but I think a lot of this is about what we do – it isn’t separate from making art. It’s all part and parcel of the same thing. Making art as far as I’m concerned.
George: I agree, we see each other as artists. We don’t see each other as two people who happen to make art.
by Michael Glover, May 30, 2020 on Hyperallergic
In this short essay, Michael Glover muses on Francesca Woodman’s House #3, Providence, Rhode Island (1976). He discusses Surrealism beyond the scope of Parisian men of the early 20th Century to encompass a decades-long, global, gender-challenging approach, crediting Woodman as one of its great artists.
Happy Birthday to Betty! Celebrating and missing her indefatigable spirit, zest for life, and myriad talents. Tante baci, Betty.
Whether working in Providence, Rhode Island, Italy or New York City, Francesca often sought out and responded to the patterns and forms created by light. It became almost a protagonist in her photographs, interacting with the figure and redefining the appearance of space. Continuing posts in the month of May will explore this aspect of her work.
Happy Birthday to George: artist and writer, classicist and modernist, lifelong explorer and thinker, maestro of color and grisaille.
Born on the 3rd of April, Francesca Woodman (1958 - 1981) was a prodigious talent, making her first mature photograph at the age of 13 and going on to create an ambitious body of work including intimately-scaled photographs, monumental diazotypes, artist books and videos. "Growing up under Rocky Mountain skies, along with one brother, two cats and piano lessons, Francesca lived in a lively family milieu of artists," wrote her father George Woodman. She was raised in Boulder, Colorado and Italy and also lived and worked in Providence, Rhode Island and New York City. Her photographs have been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide, including solo exhibitions at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. This photograph was taken by her friend George Lange, when they were both students at Rhode Island School of Design in the 1970s.
March 15, 2020 through January 31, 2021
Dallas Museum of Art
www.dma.org
Virtual exhibition now on view: https://virtual.dma.org/dreamer-of-houses/
This exhibition of works from the museum’s collection immerses viewers in ways that our homes and private spaces reflect and represent our desires, values and selves. Included is Betty Woodman’s The Red Table (2014) from her series of “paintings” which present complex and imaginative illusions of domestic space in canvas, ceramic, paint and wood.
February 21, 2020 extended through December, 2020
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
www.imj.org.il
View the exhibition online including a virtual tour with curator Adina Kamien-Kazhdan: https://www.imj.org.il/en/exhibitions/bodyscapes
Bodyscapes brings together works from nearly 3000 years ago to today which consider the aspects of the human body and its relationship to the larger world. The exhibition includes a section on the Human Landscape which specifically explores shifting representations of the female body and nature and features a group of photographs by Francesca Woodman.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue.
In honor of the holiday George held most dear, we share one of the many Valentines he made and sent to friends each year.
February 5, 2020 through June 14, 2020
The Menil Collection
www.menil.org
This exhibition draws on the Menil’s vast collection to explore Surrealist photography from its early incarnations to the ripple effect this avant-garde movement has had on contemporary artistic practices. Six photographs by Francesca Woodman, interventions into the conventions of self-portraiture and female representation, are a highlight of the exhibition’s section on the body.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue.
November 30, 2019 through March 8, 2020
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon
www.mba-lyon.fr
Beginning with Albert Dürer’s Êtude de draperie, an exceptional drawing in the museum’s collection, this exhibition explores the enduring fascination with drapery among artists from the Renaissance through the 20th century. Photographs and diazotypes by Francesca Woodman are shown alongside drawings, photographs and sculptures by Rodin, Christo & JeanneClaude, Degas and others.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
November 22, 2019 through January 2021
Whitney Museum of American Art
www.whitney.org
Drawn from works in the museum’s collection, this survey explores ways that artists have drawn on the materials and methods of craft. The exhibition takes a historical perspective, spanning 70 years of creative output by artists, including a range of works by Betty Woodman from her ground-breaking Joined Vases (1972), an early example of her push beyond production pottery while still embracing it as subject matter, to her ambitious and animated Still Life Vase #11 (1990).
October 27, 2019 through May 11, 2020
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
www.moca.org
This ambitious exhibition, curated by Anna Katz, brings together American artists associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement in the first such comprehensive and scholarly survey. The exhibition showcases painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, installation and performance which embraced craft-based and decorative traditions and approached art-making from a sometimes dizzying appreciation of historic sources and feminist aesthetics.The exhibition includes works by several artists only loosely tied to P & D including Betty Woodman’s breakthrough wall-based sculptures made in the late 1970s and early 1980s which consider function and the decoration historically connected to ceramics as their subject matter.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
October 12, 2019 through February 22, 2020
Laing Art Gallery
www.laingartgallery.org.uk
This exhibition challenges a popular trope in 19th Century painting in which women were often depicted as ornamental objects confined to interior spaces, and instead foregrounds ways in which female artists resist or appropriate these conventions to their own ends. Historically significant paintings by Edward Burne-Jones and John Frederick Lewis as well as their contemporaries Emma Sandys and Evelyn De Morgan tie these representations to more recent works that reconsider the implications of such spaces. The multiple photographs from Francesca Woodman’s House series included here alternately suggest entrapment or escape.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and is scheduled to travel to Guildhall Art Gallery, London.
October 3, 2019 through January 5, 2020
Fundacion Canal
www.fundacioncanal.com
This solo exhibition presents 102 photographs ranging from Francesca Woodman’s small-scale gelatin silver prints to architecturally-scaled caryatids and other diazotypes, along with a selection of video works. This comprehensive survey of Francesca Woodman’s oeuvre thematically approaches photographs from all periods in her short but productive career, showcasing some of her best-known works, presenting series of images in full, and highlighting other works which have been rarely seen.
The exhibition was organized by Anna Tellgren, Curator of Photography at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden where it originated (2015). It then traveled to Foam, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2016); Fondation Henri Cartier Bresson, Paris, France (2016); Moderna Museet, Malmo, Sweden (2017); and Finnish Museum of Photography (2017). It will travel to C/O Berlin in 2020.
A fully-illustrated exhibition catalogue—published in English, Swedish, French and Spanish—includes essays by Anna-Karin Palm, Anna Tellgren and George Woodman.
Photographs and Ephemera from the Collection of George Lange
September 20, 2019 through April 5, 2020
MCA Denver
www.mcadenver.org
Photographs and ephemera from the collection of George Lange—Francesca Woodman’s close friend while at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design in the 1970s and later in New York City—comprise this intimate and insightful exhibition, curated by Nora Burnett Abrams. Woodman’s photographs, notes and letters—shown alongside Lange’s portraits of her—offer a nuanced picture of her years at RISD, where she honed her already well-formed creative vision through experimentation both playful and purposeful.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
September 14, 2019 through January 19, 2020
Vitra Design Museum
www.design-museum.de
This comprehensive exhibition juxtaposes Surrealist artworks and design objects, revealing ways that this provocative art movement influenced design, fashion and photography over the past 100 years. Major artworks from Surrealism’s seminal period in the first half of the 20th Century are included, along with Francesca Woodman’s photograph A Woman; A Mirror; A Woman is a Mirror for a Man (circa1975-1978), highlighting the influence of Surrealism on Woodman’s practice and its relationship to gender representation and identity.
This exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue and is scheduled to travel to multiple institutions throughout Europe.
June 26, 2019 through September 22, 2019
ICA Boston
www.icaboston.org
Taking as its starting point the explosion of exuberant artworks made in the late1970s and early 1980s, this exhibition, curated by Jenelle Porter, traces a maximalist impulse and the legacy of Pattern and Decoration to contemporary works in sculpture, painting, ceramic, dance, furniture design, installation and more. Betty Woodman is represented by works spanning her career including the multi-part fabric and ceramic work Window (1980), made while an artist-in-residence at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and Of Botticelli (2013), a 32-foot long bold and balletic ceramic composition.
June 23, 2019 through November 3, 2019
Musée Regional D'art Contemporain
mrac.laregion.fr
This exhibition embraces an approach to art-making focused on the merits of the handmade and the decorative in the context of a world more often focused on the utilitarian. Betty Woodman’s evocative canvas and ceramic paintings of rooms and courtyards are shown alongside two of her bronze benches cast from forms first made in clay.
June 23, 2019 through November 3, 2019
Musée Regional D'art Contemporain
mrac.laregion.fr
This exhibition embraces an approach to art-making focused on the merits of the handmade and the decorative in the context of a world more often focused on the utilitarian. Two of George Woodman’s paintings from the 1970s are included in which his rigorous and formal approach to patterning is balanced by muted colors and shifting tones influenced by his years in Italy.
May 24, 2019 through January 12, 2020
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
www.guggenheim.org
Artists mine the museum’s collection to curate a series of exhibitions reflecting their own preoccupations and presenting renowned masterpieces alongside lesser-known works as only an artist might. Francesca Woodman’s Untitled, New York (1979-1980) is included in Paul Chan’s selection: “Sex, Water, Salvation, or What Is a Bather?”
May 16, 2019 through October 20, 2019
Consortium Museum
www.leconsortium.fr
Jointly curated and presented with MAMCO Geneva, this exhibition considers the achievements of artists associated with Pattern and Decoration in the United States 1970s and 1980s and ways that their work celebrated decorative and non-Western visual motifs. A later work by Betty Woodman, Villa Oplantis (2006), is featured in the exhibition, a testament to the enduring influence of this ground-breaking movement.
May 16, 2019 through October 20, 2019
Consortium Museum
www.leconsortium.fr
Jointly curated and presented with MAMCO Geneva, this exhibition considers the achievements of artists associated with Pattern and Decoration in the United States and ways that their work celebrated decorative and non-Western visual motifs. George Woodman was closely connected with the Criss-Cross art movement based in Boulder, Colorado which existed somewhat at the margins of P & D, but his paintings of the period—including Grey Portal (1978) and Untitled (1974) shown here—convey his embrace of color, decoration and beauty despite his rigorous and minimalist approach to the origins of pattern.
January 22, 2019 through February, 2020
Gracie Mansion
www1.nyc.gov
Artworks by New York-based women and women-identifying artists fill the stately rooms of Gracie Mansion, hung in a boisterous salon-style, telling the story of tenacious women over the City’s last century. Betty Woodman’s Grey Stripe Diptych (2016) is included, amusingly installed just beneath Diane Arbus’ Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey (1967).