Bey Woodman My work for the past 50 years or so has been involved with a sort of “seng the stage” for a performance. At mes the theatrics happened at breakfast, dinner or tea; at mes the scenery has included flowers in vases in architectural sengs. References to other works of art have also always been present as a constant in my pracce. Such work is intended to be read with the inclusion of our knowledge of other works of art. These have ranged from Korean folk art painng to Masse and Bonnard to Classic Greek and Roman vases. Recently, I have been looking at Roman Frescos and various other wall painngs where images of architecture are painted on the actual walls. These give the illusion, with their columns and windows, of architecture within architecture. I have also observed how oen these frescos include images of vase…There are a series of cross-references in ceramic, wood, glaze and paint which return us to the “theatrical” domain of the wall pieces. We go to the theater to see plays and “play” is fundamental to the spirit of my recent work. Character, mise en scene, costume, plot and denouement are all important here. I am playing with play. Bey Woodman, 2010 Betty Woodman (1930 - 2018) began her nearly seventy-year engagement with clay in the 1950s as a functional potter with the aim of creating beautiful objects to enhance everyday life. In the 1960s, the vase form became Woodman’s subject, product, and muse. In deconstructing and reconstructing its form, she created an exuberant and complex body of ceramic sculpture. Its signature is her reflection of a wide range of influences and traditions and an inventive use of color. Many of these traditions Woodman experienced first-hand: she traveled extensively, finding inspiration in cultures around the world. Woodman was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, raised in Newton, Massachusetts, and studied ceramics at The School for American Craftsmen in Alfred, New York, from 1948-1950. She traveled to Italy for the first time in 1951, solo, having worked to save just enough money to buy an ocean liner ticket. Woodman found her way to Fiesole, and an unplanned apprenticeship in the studio of Giorgio Ferrero and Lionello Fallacara that altered and clarified the course of her work. She returned to Italy several times in the 1950s and 60s. She married George Woodman in 1953 and they moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1956. She returned to Florence in 1966 when she received a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship. In 1968, she and George bought a farmhouse in Antella, Italy, which profoundly affected her work and where they and their children spent significant time throughout their lives. Woodman had her first one-person exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska in 1970. She taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder from 1978 - 1998 and later became Professor Emeritus. When she and George bought a loft in New York City in 1980, she decided to stop making functional pottery and began showing her sculptures at contemporary galleries in New York and Los Angeles. Numerous awards followed including National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1980 and 1986. In 1992, Woodman had solo exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. She received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at the Bellagio Study Center, Bellagio, Italy in 1995 and had her first major international museum solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1996. From 1998 until her death, she lived and worked between New York and Antella. Woodman was the subject of the first solo exhibition by a living woman artist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2006. She received honorary doctorates from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2006, University of Colorado in 2007 and Rhode Island School of Design in 2009, as well as the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum/Modernism Design Award in 2009. Woodman completed major commissions at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China for the State Department’s Art in Embassies program in 2008 and the U.S. Courthouse in Jefferson City, Missouri through the General Services Administration in 2012. Major solo exhibitions followed at K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai, China in 2018 and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 2016. Betty Woodman’s work is included in more than fifty public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Musée des Arts Decoratifs Paris, France; and Museu Nacional do Azulejo, Lisbon, Portugal. Francesca’s home page: I would have waited six months and then read books, leers, slept in blankets and have been my own archeologist for this lost bit of civilizaon – this ac ghost. People don’t turn heads much up or down. I like to watch cats who move their whole heads to see and try to do so too. Perhaps improve circulaon to the mind thus. Francesca Woodman, 1975 Francesca Woodman (1958 - 1981), a prodigious talent, made her first mature photograph at the age of 13 and created a body of work that has been critically acclaimed in the years since her death. Born into a family of artists in Boulder, Colorado, she attended public school there. She also spent much of her childhood in Italy, including attending second grade at a public school in Florence and most summers in Antella starting in 1969. Woodman was immersed in and influenced Italian art, architecture, and culture throughout her life. In 1972-1973, she attended boarding school at the Abbott Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where she discovered photography and began to hone her craft in earnest. She attended Phillips Academy in Andover in 1973-74 and then returned to Boulder, where she graduated from high school in 1975. Much of Woodman’s work was produced as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where she studied from 1975-1978. Her sophisticated understanding of photography and her artistic maturity were evident. During this time she had solo exhibitions at Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts (1976) and her thesis exhibition at Woods-Gerry Gallery, RISD, Providence, Rhode Island (1978). From 1977-78, Woodman lived in Rome as part of the RISD Rome Honors Program, presenting a solo exhibition at Libreria Maldoror, Rome in 1978. She moved to the East Village of New York in 1979 and spent that summer in Stanwood, Washington. In New York, she became interested in commercial fashion photography as a way of potentially supporting her fine art work, producing a number of “fashion” photographs in 1979 and 1980. She was a fellow at the prestigious MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire during the summer of 1980, after which she returned to New York and continued developing her series of large-scale diazotypes printed on blue or sepia architect’s paper. Woodman was included in lifetime group exhibitions at Galleria Ugo Ferrante, Rome (1978); Daniel Wolf, Inc, New York (1980); and the Alternative Museum, New York (1980), where she presented the Temple ProjectThis work, the largest and most complex from the diazotypeseries, comprises photographs of herself and friends as caryatids among photos of classical architecture and interiors and isnow in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her artist’s book, Some Disordered Interior Geometries, was published by Synapse Pressin 1981. In 1985, art historian Ann Gabhart organized the first solo museum exhibition of Woodman’s work, along with Rosalind Krauss and Abigail Solomon Godeau, which was presented at the Wellesley College Museum, Wellesley, Massachusetts and Hunter College Art Gallery, New York, among others, in 1986. This seminal exhibition began a robust museum interest in Woodman’s work that continues in the present. Other notable solo museum exhibitions include the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 1998 which toured to most countries in Europe; a major U.S. retrospective at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California in 2011 and the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2012. Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel was organized by and presented at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 2015 and travelled to several European cities. Woodman has been included in a multitude of group exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America and her photographs have been frequently reproduced in books, catalogues and other publications. Francesca Woodman, a comprehensive monograph with an essay by Chris Townsend, was published by Phaidon Press in 2006. Woodman’s photographs are included in major museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Detroit Institute of Arts; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Tate, London; Detroit; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; National Gallery of Scotland; Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. George’s home page: It was daunng to move into the cavernous studio [Tuscany, 1965-66] occupied by the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrandt nearly a century earlier. Surrounded by casts from the Parthenon, I began midly with a lile geometric painng. Freezing in winter, I burned lumber scraps in the round stove and learned to paint with gloves on. The high window gave me sky and the ps of cypress trees.