Betty Woodman, life-long lover of flowers of all stripes, was born on this day in 1930. Happy birthday, Betty!

“Women and Change” at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Denmark considers unfolding depictions of women in Western art history over the past 150 years, a period that roughly parallels the history of the women’s rights movement. The exhibition presents works by 64 international artists that challenge ideas about the body, gender, identity and history, including Francesca Woodman’s “Caryatid” (1980).

"At age fourteen I decided to become an artist, ambition enough for my life,” George Woodman once wrote. And over the next seven decades, he did just that, working fervently as a painter and photographer, and also as a writer and professor. Today, we celebrate George, who was born on this day in 1932!

Spring flowers always remind us of Betty Woodman, and particularly her vases in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which greeted visitors to the museum with their bold colors, overlapping patterns and allusions to vases and gardens, holding an ever-changing display of seasonal blooms. They were installed on the occasion of her 2006 retrospective there—the first time the museum dedicated such an exhibition to a living woman artist.

Fifty-two years ago this week would have been your last chance to see George Woodman’s solo exhibition at Spectrum Gallery in New York City. Woodman’s canvases and prints during this period were characterized by fields of interlocking, repetitive shapes, which, as Robert Berlind later described: “may be seen as a reprise of the transition earlier in the century from a still-descriptive cubism to a “purer” non-referentiality. These paintings are equally in keeping with the contemporaneous interests of Op Art and made a crucial contribution to the Criss-Cross movement which flourished in the 70’s in Boulder and had an impact on the New York scene.”

Born on this day in 1958 in Boulder, Colorado, Francesca Woodman lived and worked in Providence, Rhode Island, Rome and New York City. Here she is on a summer day at the Coney Island boardwalk.

Francesca Woodman in “girls girls girls” at Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore, Ireland. On view April 2 through October 30, 2022. Curated by Simone Rocha.

We are pleased to share “The Lady of the Glove: Francesca Woodman and Surrealism” by Celia Bùi Lê, who was our research intern this past summer through the Studio Institute. In her essay, Lê traces the history of Surrealism as related to women, both as maker and as muse, and discusses Woodman’s use of its tropes as a type of creative empowerment.

Congratulations to Edwin Frank, Woodman Family Foundation Board member and longtime friend, on being honored with the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a distinguished poet, founder and editor of New York Review Books Classics, and editorial director of New York Review Books. Frank's fellow recipients of the Academy's highest honors for excellence in the arts this year are Adrienne Kennedy, Kara Walker, Anna Deveare Smith, and Phillip Lopate.

Betty Woodman first traveled to Italy in 1951, on the suggestion of her friends Grace and John Tagliabue who invited her to join them there. She spent the year in Fiesole, renting a room on a hillside overlooking Florence and its Duomo and working in a pottery studio owned by painter Giorgio Ferrero and sculptor Lionello Fallacara.

Although the Woodman Family Foundation archives are starting to take shape, there is still much more material to process before we are ready to open them up to scholars and researchers. Currently, we are processing George Woodman’s paper tiles and related plans, descriptions and documentation so that we can better understand this key aspect of his practice, which took his work with pattern off the canvas and into space and situation.

Francesca Woodman in “A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920-2020.” Whitechapel Gallery, London. February 24 through June 5, 2022.