Betty Woodman – (1930 - )

BETTY WOODMAN – (1930 - ) Betty Woodman‟s retrospective in 2006 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art covered the over 50 years of this unique artist‟s career. While she is perhaps best-known for her exuberant vases and vessels, with their bright, loose surface decoration, she began her ceramic career as a production potter and believes her current work still pays homage to the traditions of ceramic art. More recently she has been making large-scale installations as well as exploring other media such as bronze and print-making. Woodman and her husband,painter/photographer George Woodman, divide their time between their homes/studios in New York and Italy. ARTIST’S STATEMENT – BETTY WOODMAN “The fragmented object has been with us since cubism. I propose in these recent pieces the fragmented painting as the subject of an object…My work in recent years has evolved from being objects defined by their shapes to being shapes defined by the painting upon them. The shapes are initially composed as ceramic elements, but it is with the application of color that they come to life….I try to make the ceramic and painting parts become separate voices and their interplay like a fugue. In a funny way I think what I am trying to do is to convey the integrity of a painting through echoes of its parts as the ceramic or bronze forms are often echoes or reflections of their parts. The whole thing becomes an oblique mode of representation in which a painting becomes the subject of an object.” 1 1. Quoted from “Convocation Address” given on April 22, 2006, at NSCAD, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and taken from: http://www.nscad.ns.ca/alumni/woodman1.php RESUME – BETTY WOODMAN May 14, 1930 Born, Norwalk, CT 1948–1950 Alfred University, School for the American Craftsman, Alfred, NY 1951-1952 & 1959-1960 Fiesole, Italy working with Giorgio Ferrero 1953 Marries artist/photographer George Woodman 1954-1955 Albuquerque, NM; studio artist 1956-1974 Boulder, CO, studio artist Pottery Instructor and Administrator, City of Boulder Recreation Department, Boulder, CO 1966 Fulbright-Hays Scholarship to Florence, Italy 1975 Visiting Artist, New York State College of Ceramics, Alfred, NY 1977 Visiting Artist, Scripps College, Claremont, CA 1978-1998 Professor, Fine Art Department, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 1980, 1986 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship 1987 Governor‟s Award in the Arts, Colorado 1993 Distinguished Research & Creative Lectureship, University of Colorado, Boulder Residency at European Ceramic Work Center, „s-Hergogenbosch, The Netherlands 1995 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Bellagio Study Center, Italy 1998 The Visionary Award of the American Craft Museum, New York 1998-present Professor Emeritus, University of Colorado at Boulder, Fine Art Department, Boulder, CO 2000 Honorary Fellow, National Council of Educators in Ceramic Arts 2004 Premio Internazionale Vietri sul Mare, Fondazione Museo Artistico Industriale, Salerno, Italy 2006 Doctor of Fine Arts, honoris causa, NSCAD University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada Present Lives and works in New York City and Antella, Italy BETTY WOODMAN Betty Woodman was born in Norwalk, CT, in 1930, moving to Boston a few years later where she grew up. Her father worked in the food industry and her mother worked with Jewish charities and then in the administration of Brandeis University during its early years. Her father was a woodworker by avocation, and Woodman shared his interest in crafts, choosing woodworking instead of sewing in junior high school and discovering pottery in high school. Her high school teacher was instrumental in encouraging her to follow her love of clay, and after graduation she enrolled in The School for American Craftsmen, Alfred, NY, in 1948. Students there were expected to become production potters, learning the business aspects of pottery as a career as well as the techniques themselves. After completing her studies she returned to Boston where she taught her first ceramics class; one of her students was George Woodman whom she would later marry. Woodman made her first trip to Italy in 1951, working with Giorgio Ferrero. Italy opened her eyes to the wider field of ceramic art, and she was to fall in love with the vast possibilities of pottery as well as Italy itself. She returned to Boston where she married George Woodman and set up her first studio while he finished his studies at Harvard. The couple moved to New Mexico following his graduation where he got a masters degree in painting and she again set up a studio for production pottery, building a wood- fired kiln and making functional earthenware. The mid-1950‟s took the Woodmans to Boulder, CO, where George began teaching painting and aesthetics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and Betty, in addition to her studio production, began teaching at the City of Boulder Parks and Recreation Department. They returned to Italy in 1959 for a year to again work and learn. Upon their return they bought a house and Betty built her first real studio and gas kiln. Over the next few years she was to meet Paul Soldner and other influential artists whose work and friendship stimulated her own work. She continued to teach in the Parks and Recreation Department which by now had grown sufficiently popular that she had to hire a staff to help with the teaching and firing. Ceramics was forming a community in Boulder. Betty received a Fulbright grant in 1965 which allowed the Woodmans to return to Italy. Their love of living and working in Italy led them to buy a farmhouse in Antella, outside Florence, in the late 1960‟s where they both established studios and set up a home. Betty‟s work had continued to evolve and she was now salt firing, making large pots influenced by the Roman and Etruscan pots she had seen and to some degree as well by Oriental pots. Her first one-person museum show at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, NE exhibited some of her salt-glazed forms, and others of her pieces were later shown at the American Craft Museum in New York. The Woodmans continued to shift between Colorado and Italy. By the late 1970‟s, their children nearly grown, they decided to try out working in New York as well. They found a loft which they converted to two studios and a living space and worked out a schedule that allowed them to spend a semester teaching at the University of Colorado and another in New York, keeping the summers free to go to Italy. At the same time, Betty was shifting from making functional pottery to more sculptural forms, working primarily with earthenware. While earlier Betty had made the pottery forms and George had painted them, now she was doing her own painting and glazing, working with the bright colors she loves and patterns and designs that draw from the history of art. How she worked and the subsequent pieces which resulted were influenced by where she was working, the pieces done in the Colorado and New York studios different from the ones done in Italy. While at first she had found that disconcerting, she came to embrace how it allowed her work to expand and grow. The Woodmans retired from the University of Colorado in 1996 and now split their time evenly between New York and Italy. In addition to the brightly decorated vessels that are in some ways her signature pieces, she has also been working in large scale installations, bronze, and prints and drawings. She has described her work as a “painting becoming the subject of the object”, a blending, even perhaps a blurring between what is a ceramic and what is a painting. Over the course of her long and varied career, Woodman has had a number of one- person and group exhibits, one of the most notable being “The Art of Betty Woodman,” a retrospective dating back to the 1950s which was held in 2006 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Met noted that this show was both the first major US retrospective of her work and also of a female ceramist. The book Betty Woodman by Janet Koplos, Arthur C. Danto, and Barry Schwabsky was published in conjunction with this show. Woodman‟s work has also been included in such well-known museums as The American Craft Museum in New York, The Cleveland Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Art Museum, The Renwick Gallery in Washington DC, and the Whitney Museum in New York. Her awards have included a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship to Florence, Italy; two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships; the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship; Honorary Fellow, National Council of Educators in Ceramic Arts; Professor Emeritus, University of Colorado at Boulder; and visiting artist fellowships. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY – BETTY WOODMAN Books and Catalogs Berlind, Robert, Betty Woodman, and George Woodman. Betty Woodman: Between Sculpture and Painting: Recent Work. Fort Dodge, IA: Blanden Memorial Art Museum, 1999. Clark, Garth. American Potters: The Work of Twenty Modern Masters. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1981. Clark, Garth, and Tony Cunha. The Artful Teapot. New York: Watson-Guptill, 2001. Danto, Arthur Coleman. Betty Woodman. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1997. Felver, Christopher. Studio Shots. Omaha, NE: Alternative Work Site, 1985. 5X7: Seven Ceramic Artists Each Acknowledge Five Sources of Inspiration. New York: Division of Ceramic Art, School of Art and Design, New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, 1993. Galusha, Emily. What’s Clay Got to Do With It? Minneapolis, MN: Northern Clay Center, 1995. Galusha, Emily, and Mary Ann Nord. Clay Talks: Reflections by American Master Ceramists. Minneapolis, MN: Northern Clay Center, 2004. Henriques, Paulo, Cathryn Drake, Patterson Sims, and Roland Blaettler.

Load more